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Sirens | |
Sirens are human-headed birds which make their first appearance in Greek mythology in the Odyssey, an epic poem attributed to Homer (1). In this story, the sirens are said to lure sailors to an island by singing in "honey-sweet voice[s]" (2) and promising to provide the men with great wisdom, only to add the sailors' bodies to the beach that is "piled with the bones of men now rotted away" (3). When Odysseus and his men resisted the sirens' song, the sirens flung themselves into the ocean and drowned. However, Homer gives no description of these creatures. Our first glimpses of how sirens were thought to have looked appear in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE and are found mostly in the form of decorative attachments for bronze vessels or painted decoration on ceramic vases.
Because Homer gives no physical description, it is believed that the Greeks based their image of the sirens on Near Eastern mythological creatures (4). One such creature thought to have influenced depictions of Near Eastern human-headed birds, which in turn influenced images of sirens in Greece, is the ba -bird found in Egyptian mythology. The most likely areas from which the Greeks would have derived and modified their image of the siren are Urartu, North Syria, and Assyria (5). For instance the god Assur, who was worshipped in Assyria , took this same form of a bird's body with a bearded human head.
Corinthian vase painters quite favored sirens when decorating their vessels; in fact, sirens seem to have been more popular than most other winged creatures which appear on Corinthian pottery such as sphinxes, griffins, panther-birds, goat-birds, phallus-birds, and winged lions or horses (6). The earliest sirens are shown in male as well as female form. The one on CU Art Museum 2006.37.T appears to be male, as are most depictions of human-headed birds in the Near East. Interestingly, male sirens disappear in Greek art by the fifth century BCE, and only depictions of female ones survive (7). This departure from using a male (Near Eastern) version of the siren, and the corresponding increased popularity of the female siren may be due to the fact that the sirens in the Odyssey are, in fact, female. Therefore, it is possible that the Greeks had begun to move away from foreign representations of these creatures and to move toward a more purely Greek version.
In early representations, sirens often carried a negative connotation and have been interpreted as death omens--iconography which most likely is due to their role in the Odyssey. However, although these creatures maintained their association with death, later portrayals of sirens are less sinister both in appearance and in context. Not only are they included quite frequently in sanctuary dedications and Artemis(8), but they also find their way into funerary scenes (9), mourning for the dead. This less hostile view of sirens creates a similarity to Egyptian ba -birds beyond mere physical form. The ba was the embodiment of a person's soul, which freed itself from the physical body and could roam the earth at the time of death (10). It represented "the freedom and mobility of the spirit of the deceased" (11) with the implication that although a person may have died, his or her soul continued to live.
Sirens are said by Euripides (12) to live in the underworld as Persephone's companions, and they were believed to accompany the dead to the underworld while producing their "charming music" (13), rather than acting as the cause of death as they did in Homer's epic. Sirens may also have taken on a connotation of life after death. Because in the sixth century BCE there came to be an increasing concern for one's fate after death, and because sirens--whom we know to have occupied the underworld, as stated above--could impart supernatural wisdom, they "became a symbol of an otherwise near-inexpressible yearning for something akin to Paradise after death" (14).
Author: Jessika Akmenkalns
(1) Despoina Tsiafakis 2003. "' PELORA ': Fabulous Creatures and/or Demons of Death?", The Centaur's Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art , ed. J.Michael Padgett. ( New Haven , CT : Yale University Press 2003): 73-104.
(4) For origins of the depictions of sirens, see John Pollard, Seers, Shrines, and Sirens: The Greek Religious Revolution in the Sixth Century B.C. (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co. 1965): 137-45; see also essays by Michael Bennett, Karen Manchester, J.Michael Padgett, Carrie E. Tovar, and Despoina Tsiafakis in Padgett, The Centaur's Smile .
(5) Michael Bennett, "Siren from the Rim of a Lebes," in Padgett, The Centaur's Smile , 285-87.
(6) Aaron J. Paul, "Aryballos with a Siren," in Padgett, The Centaur's Smile , 291-92.
(7) Tsiafakis, "' PELORA '," in Padgett, The Centaur's Smile , 75.
(8) Karen Manchester, "Aryballos in the Shape of a Siren," in Padgett, The Centaur's Smile , 293-94.
(9) For an image of a funerary askos in the shape of a siren holding a pomegranate, see Tsiafakis, "' PELORA '," in Padgett, The Centaur's Smile , 76.
(10) Christine Hobson, The World of the Pharaohs: A Complete Guide to Ancient Egypt (New York: Thames & Hudson 1987): 152.
(11) Carrie E. Tovar, "Round-Bodied Pyxis," in Padgett, The Centaur's Smile , 287-90.
(12) Euripides, Helen , 168-78.
(13) Tsiafakis, "' PELORA '," in Padgett, The Centaur's Smile , 78.