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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter III: Monsters & Creatures

Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis: Sea Monsters of Greek Myth

Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis in Greek myth: the deadly song in the Odyssey, bird-bodied Sirens, the six-headed Scylla, the whirlpool and other sea monsters.

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The Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis are the most famous perils of the sea in Greek myth, all met by Odysseus on his voyage home in book 12 of the Odyssey, whose wider story is told in Odysseus and the wanderings of the Odyssey. The Sirens were singers whose irresistible song lured sailors to their deaths; Scylla was a six-headed monster who snatched men from passing ships; and Charybdis was a whirlpool that swallowed the sea three times a day. Later writers placed Scylla and Charybdis on either side of the Strait of Messina, and "between Scylla and Charybdis" became a proverb for a choice between two dangers.

The Sirens in Homer's Odyssey§

The witch Circe warns Odysseus before he leaves her island. The Sirens, she says, bewitch everyone who comes near them; whoever hears their voice never returns home to wife and children, for they sit in a meadow surrounded by a heap of bones and the shrivelled skin of rotting men. She tells him to soften wax and stop his companions' ears, and if he wishes to listen himself, to have them bind him hand and foot to the mast and tie him tighter if he begs to be released.

All happens as she said. The wind drops and the sea falls calm as the ship approaches. Odysseus cuts a cake of wax, warms it in the sun and seals his men's ears, and they row on while he strains at the ropes. The song itself is a promise not of love but of knowledge: the Sirens hail him as the glory of the Achaeans and offer to tell him everything the Greeks and Trojans suffered at Troy and all that happens on the fruitful earth. Homer uses the dual grammatical number, suggesting there were two of them, and never describes their appearance. The temptation he imagines is intellectual as much as sensual, which is why later philosophers found the episode so fruitful.

Who Were the Sirens? Parentage, Names and Bird Bodies§

Later sources usually count three Sirens, though their names vary. Apollodorus calls them Peisinoe, Aglaope and Thelxiepeia, daughters of the river Achelous and the Muse Melpomene, one singing, one playing the lyre and one the pipes; other writers call them Parthenope, Leucosia and Ligeia, or make their father the sea god Phorcys. Ovid explains their bird bodies: they were companions of Persephone and, after she was carried off to the underworld, asked for wings to search for her over the sea. Pausanias records another tale in which they challenged the Muses to a singing contest and lost, and the Muses made crowns from their feathers.

From the seventh century BCE Greek artists showed Sirens as birds with women's heads, later adding human arms and torsos. Some scholars compare this form with the human-headed ba-bird of Egyptian art, though the line of borrowing is uncertain. The most famous image is an Athenian red-figure jar in the British Museum (c. 480–470 BCE) showing Odysseus bound to the mast while one Siren plunges towards the sea with closed eyes, perhaps reflecting the tradition that the Sirens were fated to die if a ship ever passed them unharmed.

That tradition took several forms. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes the Argonauts escape because Orpheus drowns out the Sirens' song with his lyre, though one sailor, Butes, leaps overboard and is rescued by Aphrodite. Other writers say that after Odysseus passed, the Sirens threw themselves into the sea, and that the body of Parthenope washed ashore in Italy, where the city later called Naples was first named after her; Strabo mentions her tomb there and a torch race held in her honour.

Sirens of Death, Lament and Cosmic Harmony§

The Sirens were not only monsters. Because their song was linked with death, they became mourners and guardians of the dead. Siren figures, tearing their hair or playing the lyre, stand on Attic tombs of the fourth century BCE, and in Euripides' Helen the heroine calls on the "winged maidens, daughters of Earth" to accompany her lament. These funerary Sirens belong to the world of mourning described in Greek burial, the dead and hero cults.

Plato gave them a cosmic role. In the Myth of Er at the end of the Republic, the soul sees the spindle of Necessity with its eight whorls, the circles of the heavens; on each stands a Siren singing a single note, and the eight notes together make one harmony. Later Platonists read the Sirens as the music of the spheres, so that the same creatures could stand for fatal seduction and for the order of the universe.

Scylla: The Six-Headed Monster of the Strait§

Circe also describes Scylla, who lives in a cave high in a smooth cliff that no mortal could climb. Her voice is no louder than a newborn puppy's yelp, but she is a terrible monster with twelve dangling feet and six immensely long necks, each with a fearsome head and three rows of close-set teeth. From her cave she fishes for dolphins and sea creatures, and from every ship that passes she seizes one man with each head. Circe advises Odysseus not to fight her but to row hard past, and Homer calls her mother Crataeis. As the ship goes by, Scylla snatches six of his best men, who cry out his name as they are lifted away, a sight Odysseus calls the most pitiful he saw on all his travels.

Later poets gave her a past. In Ovid's Metamorphoses (books 13 and 14) Scylla is a beautiful nymph loved by the sea god Glaucus, who asks Circe for a love charm; Circe, wanting Glaucus herself, poisons the pool where Scylla bathes, and her lower body turns into a ring of barking dogs. She is later turned into a rock dangerous to sailors. Virgil's Aeneid describes her as a maiden to the waist and a sea beast below, and the prophet Helenus advises Aeneas to sail round Sicily rather than risk the strait. Hellenistic and Roman artists showed her as a woman with fish tails and the foreparts of dogs at her waist; the great marble group found in 1957 in the grotto of a seaside villa at Sperlonga, associated with the emperor Tiberius, shows her attacking Odysseus' ship. She should not be confused with another Scylla, daughter of King Nisus of Megara, who betrayed her father for love of Minos.

Charybdis and the Strait of Messina§

Opposite Scylla, within a bowshot, lies a lower rock with a great fig tree, and beneath it Charybdis sucks down the dark water three times a day and three times spews it up again. Circe tells Odysseus that it is better to lose six men to Scylla than the whole ship to Charybdis. Later, when his crew has eaten the cattle of the Sun and the ship has been destroyed by Zeus, Odysseus drifts back to the whirlpool on a raft of timbers, leaps up and clings to the fig tree like a bat until the wreckage is thrown up again. Late commentators gave Charybdis a genealogy as a daughter of Poseidon and Earth, turned into a whirlpool by Zeus' thunderbolt for stealing the cattle of Heracles.

Already in the fifth century BCE Thucydides called the strait between Rhegium and Messana "the so-called Charybdis" through which Odysseus was said to have sailed, and Strabo described its violent currents. The town of Scilla on the Calabrian shore still bears the monster's name. Not every ancient scholar accepted such identifications: Strabo reports the geographer Eratosthenes' jibe that one would find where Odysseus wandered when one found the cobbler who stitched the bag of the winds.

The proverb took its classic form in the twelfth century, in a line of Walter of Châtillon's Alexandreis: "Incidis in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim" ("you fall into Scylla wishing to avoid Charybdis"). Erasmus collected it in his Adages, and from there it entered the European languages.

Other Monsters of the Greek Sea and Later Legacy§

The Greek sea held other perils. The kētos, a huge sea monster, was sent against Andromeda, as told in Perseus and Medusa, and against Hesione of Troy, rescued by Heracles. The sea deities Phorcys and Ceto were parents of the Gorgons and of other monsters traced in the Sphinx, the Chimera and Typhon, and shape-shifting old men of the sea, Nereus and Proteus, had to be held fast before they would prophesy. Gentler sea beings, the Nereids, are described in Centaurs, satyrs and nymphs.

Rationalising writers such as Palaephatus explained Scylla as a pirate ship and the Sirens as seductive courtesans. Christian authors made Odysseus at the mast an image of the believer bound to the cross, as Clement of Alexandria suggested around 200 CE, and by the early Middle Ages the Sirens began to acquire fish tails, a change visible in the eighth-century Liber Monstrorum. In French, Italian and Spanish the word for Siren came to mean mermaid. Painters revived both forms: J. W. Waterhouse's Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) restored the ancient bird bodies, while Herbert Draper's version of 1909 made them women of the sea.

Frequently asked questions§

What did the Sirens sing to Odysseus?§

In the Odyssey they offer knowledge rather than love: they promise to tell him all the sufferings of the Greeks and Trojans at Troy and everything that happens on earth. Homer gives only a few lines of their song.

What does "between Scylla and Charybdis" mean?§

It means being caught between two dangers, where avoiding one brings you closer to the other. It comes from Odysseus' passage between the six-headed Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis.

Were the Sirens mermaids?§

Not in ancient Greece, where they were shown as birds with women's heads. The fish-tailed Siren developed in early medieval Europe and merged with northern mermaid lore.

Where are Scylla and Charybdis?§

Ancient writers, among them Thucydides and Strabo, placed them in the Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy, with Scylla on the Italian side. Homer himself gives no real geography.

Sources and further reading§