A Reader on Reading

Homer, who offered Dante this coda to the story, also suggested (had Dante been able to read him) an answer to the question. The scene takes place in book 12 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus and his companions face the temptation of the Sirens. The enchantress Circe, after being ordered by the gods to release Odysseus from her charms, warns him of the dangers he will encounter as he sets forth (yet another retelling of the story). Among these dangers are the Sirens, capable of seducing mortals with their song. In Homer’s version they are only two, perched on a mountain of skeletons and putrid flesh that rises in the middle of a green meadow, waiting for passing ships. Whoever hears them sing, Circe tells Odysseus, will not return home again, will never be embraced by his wife or see his children’s smile, will be condemned to death and oblivion. To escape their wiles, Circe advises him to fill his men’s ears with wax and have himself tied to the mast. Then, though unable to approach them, Odysseus will nevertheless be able to hear the Sirens’ mysterious song. In Robert Fagles’s translation:

“Come closer, famous Odysseus—Achaea’s pride and glory— moor your ship on our coast so you can hear our song! Never has any sailor passed our shores in his black craft until he has heard the honeyed voices pouring from our lips, and once he hears to his heart’s content sails on, a wiser man. We know all the pains that the Achaeans and Trojans once endured on the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so — all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!”

Hearing them, Odysseus feels something within himself urging him to go towards them and gestures to his men to set him free, but they, obeying his first orders, tighten the rope that secures him to the mast. At last the ship sails past the danger and the Sirens vanish on the horizon. Odysseus and his companions have avoided yet another ending. Odysseus is now the only man on earth to have heard the Sirens’ song and survived.

Who are these Sirens? Homer does not tell us what they looked like. Ancient Greek decorations, not as old as the poem itself, show them as women with large wings or as birds with women’s faces. In the third century B.c., Apollonius of Rhodes, taking his inspiration from Homer, has his heroes, Jason and his crew, also meet the Sirens, and describes them as winged beings, half birds and half women, daughters of a river god and of one of the nine Muses. Apollonius says that the Sirens had served as Persephone’s handmaidens, entertaining her with their singing. A later legend adds that, after Persephone was kidnapped by the king of the Underworld, her mother, Demeter, punished them for not protecting her daughter, giving them wings and saying, “Now fly through the world and bring me back my child!” Another legend has it that it was Aphrodite who punished the Sirens for refusing to offer their maidenhead to either mortals or gods. Yet another tells that, in spite of having wings, the Sirens were unable to fly because the nine Muses (their mother and aunts), after defeating them in a singing contest, ripped off their feathers to make themselves garlands. Of the Sirens’ death there exist at least two versions. One says that they were killed by Hercules, whose sixth task was to eliminate the monstrous birds with beaks, wings, and claws of bronze who fed on human flesh in the Stymphalian swamps. The other, that after being snubbed by Odysseus, they plunged into the sea and drowned. It was perhaps this watery death that led in Latin tongues to the confusion between winged and fishlike creatures, calling both by the same name, unlike the distinction made in English between Sirens and mermaids, or in German between Sirene and Nixe.

Horrible as harpies or beautiful as nymphs, all Sirens are distinguished by their song. In the last book of Plato’s Republic, eight Sirens sing each a different note that together constitute the Pythagorean harmony of the celestial spheres, dear to ancient astronomers until the time of Galileo. For Plato, the Sirens’ song is less a deadly temptation than a necessary device for the correct working of the heavens. On the Sirens’ song depends the balance of the universe itself.

But can we know the nature of such a song? According to Suetonius, the emperor Tiberius, whenever he met professors of Greek literature, enjoyed asking them three impossible questions of which the third was: “What song did the Sirens sing?” Fifteen centuries later, Sir Thomas Browne observed that, though puzzling, the question was “not beyond all conjecture.” Indeed.