Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen The Sirens.
The gallery
Odysseus and the Sirens (the "Siren Vase")
The Siren Painter, c. 480–470 BC
This Attic red-figure stamnos, painted by the artist now known from it as the Siren Painter and held in the British Museum, is the most celebrated ancient image of the episode in Odyssey 12. Odysseus stands lashed upright to the mast of his ship, straining toward the music while his oarsmen — their ears stopped with wax — row on, oblivious. Three Sirens hover above the rocks in the bird-bodied form the ancient sources describe (women above, birds below); one of them, beaten by the hero's escape, pitches headlong from the cliff, a vivid rendering of the tradition (Apollodorus, Epitome 7.19) that the Sirens were fated to die once a ship passed them unharmed.
Ulysses and the Sirens (Bardo mosaic)
Unknown (Roman), 2nd century AD
A Roman floor mosaic from Dougga (ancient Thugga, in present-day Tunisia), now in the Bardo National Museum in Tunis. It depicts Odysseus' ship gliding past the Sirens' rocky island: the hero is bound to the mast, gesturing toward the singers, while his crew bend to the oars. The three Sirens are shown as bird-women perched on their crags, faithful to the classical form attested by Pausanias (9.34.3) and Hyginus rather than the later fish-tailed mermaid. The scene shows how enduringly the Homeric episode lived on in domestic Roman decoration across the Mediterranean.
Ulysses and the Sirens
John William Waterhouse, 1891
Waterhouse's oil painting (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) is one of the few modern works to restore the Sirens to their ancient avian form rather than the mermaid of later imagination. Drawing on the Greek vase tradition, he swarms Odysseus' boat with bird-bodied, women-headed Sirens who wheel in around the mast. The hero, lashed upright, throws back his head in anguished longing as his rowers — ears stopped, eyes fixed forward — pull the ship past the meadow of bones described by Circe in Odyssey 12. The crowding birds make the lure feel inescapable and physical rather than merely musical.
Ulysses and the Sirens
Herbert James Draper, c. 1909
Draper's late-Victorian oil (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull) reimagines the Sirens as alluring sea-nymphs who climb aboard Odysseus' ship, transforming from fish-tailed creatures into fully human seductresses as they reach the deck — a Romantic conflation of the Homeric Sirens with the mermaid. Odysseus, bound to the mast as Circe instructed (Odyssey 12.158–200), strains against his bonds in helpless desire while his oarsmen labour on. The picture distils the central paradox of the myth: the song that promises all knowledge is also certain death, and only the ropes save the hero who insisted on hearing it.