This article is about the mythological creatures. Sailors valentine funerary statue of a siren, playing on a tortoiseshell lyre, c. Odyssey in which Odysseus saves his crew’s lives. Roman poets placed them on some small islands called Sirenum scopuli.
Archaic perfume vase in the shape of a siren, c. The etymology of the name is contested. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin. Sirens were later often used as a synonym for mermaids, and portrayed with upper human bodies and fish tails. Odysseus and the Sirens, eponymous vase of the Siren Painter, c.
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. Originally, sirens were shown as male or female, but the male siren disappeared from art around the fifth century BC. Some surviving Classical period examples had already depicted the siren as mermaid-like. Miniature illustration of a siren enticing sailors who try to resist her, from an English Bestiary, c. As will be explained below, the siren appeared in a number of illustrated manuscripts of the Physiologus and its successors called the bestiaries. For Representations in oil on canvas, etc.