The Sirens and the Stars Odysseus Steered By

On a Greek beach at nightfall, the work of a voyage stopped. Ships were dragged up the sand, fires were lit, and the sky became the only thing still moving. That is exactly the setting Homer chooses for one of the most famous warnings in literature. In book 12 of the Odyssey, after the sun has gone down on Aeaea and the crew lie asleep by the stern cables, Circe takes Odysseus by the hand, leads him away from his companions and tells him, in order, everything that lies ahead. The first danger on her list is a song.

A warning under the stars

Circe’s description is short and strange. The Sirens sit in a meadow and enchant every man who comes near them. Whoever sails up in ignorance and hears their voice will never come home to find his wife and small children rejoicing over him. Around them lies a great heap of bones, with the skin of rotting men shrivelling on them. Homer says nothing about their bodies. He gives us a meadow, a heap of bones and a voice.

He also leaves a grammatical clue that is easy to miss in translation: he speaks of the Sirens in the dual, the Greek form reserved for pairs, so his Sirens are two. Later writers added a third and gave them names. Apollodorus calls them daughters of the river god Achelous and the Muse Melpomene, Pisinoe, Aglaope and Thelxiepeia; Apollonius of Rhodes makes their mother Terpsichore instead.

Circe’s remedy is practical. Odysseus is to stop his crew’s ears with wax. If he wants to hear the song himself, he must be bound upright against the mast, and his men must tighten the ropes if he begs to be let go.

The song of knowing everything

The ship reaches the island by daylight, and the moment is uncanny. The breeze drops, a windless calm settles on the water, and some god lulls the waves to sleep. The crew take to the oars. Odysseus cuts a round of wax with his bronze blade and kneads it until it softens under the strength of Helios, son of Hyperion: Circe is the Sun’s own daughter, and her father’s heat makes her plan work. Then the voices begin.

Come here, Odysseus, praised in every tale, great glory of the Achaeans; rest your ship and listen to our voices. No one has ever rowed his black ship past us before hearing the honey-sweet sound from our lips. We know everything the Argives and Trojans suffered in wide Troy, and all that happens on the fertile earth.

Homer, Odyssey 12 (our rendering)

What the Sirens offer is not pleasure but knowledge: the whole story of Troy and of everything under the sky. Cicero, translating these lines into Latin in his treatise On Ends, argued that this was precisely the danger, since a man who loved learning would find such a promise harder to resist than any sweet tune. Odysseus signals with his eyebrows to be untied. Perimedes and Eurylochus bind him tighter. Only when the voices fade do the crew take the wax from their ears.

Steering by the Bear

To understand what kind of sailor heard that song, go back to book 5. Leaving Calypso’s island alone on his raft, Odysseus sits at the steering oar and lets no sleep fall on his eyes. He watches the Pleiades, and Boötes that sets late, and the Bear that men also call the Wagon, which turns in one place, keeps watch on Orion, and alone has no share in the baths of Ocean. Calypso has told him to keep the Bear on his left hand. With the northern stars to port, he is heading east, toward home, and he holds that course for seventeen days.

This is the oldest description of star navigation in Greek literature, and it is precise. The Bear has no share in Ocean’s baths because, at Greek latitudes, it does not set. In Homer’s time, thanks to the slow wobble of the earth’s axis, the whole figure swung clear of the horizon all night; today the tip of its tail dips briefly below the sea from southern Greece. From most of Canada the Big Dipper never sets at all. Boötes is late-setting because the long figure sinks into the west feet first and takes much of the night to disappear. Centuries later the poet Aratus added that Greek crews steered by the Great Bear, while Phoenicians trusted the Little Bear, which turns in a tighter circle.

Doves, sisters and the sailing season

The Pleiades open the list in book 5 for good reason: for an early Greek farmer or sailor, they were the most useful stars in the sky. Hesiod’s Works and Days says to begin the harvest when the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, rise before the sun, and to start the autumn sowing when they set. The same poem gives sailors a blunt rule. When the Pleiades, fleeing the mighty strength of Orion, plunge into the misty sea, winds of every kind rage. Then a man should drag his ship ashore, pack stones around it and hang his steering oar in the smoke of the hearth.

You can watch Hesiod’s warning from a Canadian backyard. In November the little cluster climbs out of the eastern horizon as the sky darkens. A star that rises at dusk sets at dawn, and that dawn setting, with Orion close behind, told Greek sailors the season was over.

The Pleiades may even hide in Circe’s night speech. Beyond the Sirens, she says, lie the Wandering Rocks, which not even the timid doves that carry ambrosia to Zeus can pass; each time the rock snatches one away, and Zeus sends another to make up the number. Homer’s word for doves, peleiai, sits very close to the name of the star-sisters, and ancient readers noticed: Athenaeus, writing around 200 CE, quotes poets who made the doves and the Pleiades one and the same. Ovid’s Fasti adds a famous puzzle. Seven Pleiades are named, but only six are usually seen; either Merope hides because she married a mortal, or Electra veiled her face rather than watch Troy fall.

Sirens of the turning sky

Myth did not leave the Sirens on their meadow of bones. In the Argonautica, Apollonius has Orpheus drown out their voices with a quick, ringing tune on his lyre; only Butes leaps overboard, and Aphrodite snatches him from the waves. Later handbooks add that the Sirens were fated to die if anyone sailed past them unharmed, and that after Odysseus escaped they threw themselves into the sea.

Plato gave them a stranger afterlife. At the end of the Republic, in the vision of Er, the heavens are a set of nested whorls turning on the spindle of Necessity. On each circle stands a Siren, carried round with it and singing a single note, and the eight notes together make one harmony. The creatures who promised Odysseus everything that happens on earth became the voices of the turning heavens, singing to everyone and heard by no one alive.

That is the thread we follow on this site: the way the night sky held on to the stories that sailors told beneath it. The Bear, the Pleiades and Orion are still there to check against Homer, and you can find them all in our Sky Atlas. The warning itself came from Circe, daughter of the Sun, and the next danger on her list was waiting in the narrow water of Scylla and Charybdis.