Key Info

- Human like creatures that would use their beautiful voices to lure sailors to their doom.

Brief Bio

In Greek mythology, sirens are female humanlike beings with alluring voices; they appear in a scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus saves his crew's lives. They traditionally appeared in locations were surrounded by cliffs and rocks.

They were often shown playing a variety of musical instruments, especially the lyre, kithara, and aulos.

The sirens of Greek mythology first appeared in Homer's Odyssey, where Homer did not provide any physical descriptions, and their visual appearance was left to the readers' imagination. It was Apollonius of Rhodes in Argonautica (3rd century BC) who described the sirens in writing as part woman and part bird. By the 7th century BC, sirens were regularly depicted in art as human-headed birds.

Some surviving Classical period examples had already depicted the siren as mermaid-like. The sirens are described as mermaids or "tritonesses" in examples dating to the 3rd century BC, including an earthenware bowl found in Athens and a terracotta oil lamp possibly from the Roman period.

Although there are ten siren names, no more than three are ever mentioned in one story. The ten siren names are: Thelxiepeia/Thelxiope/Thelxinoe, Molpe, Himerope, Aglaophonos/Aglaope/Aglaopheme, Pisinoe/Peisinoë/Peisithoe, Parthenope, Ligeia, Leucosia, Raidne, and Teles.