The Sirens
The one danger Odysseus survives by planning: wax in the crew's ears, his own body lashed to the mast, and the song heard by a man who cannot act on it.
In the poem
Circe warns him and gives the method. The Sirens sing that they know everything that happened at Troy and everything that happens on earth — knowledge, not beauty, is the bait — and Odysseus signals to be untied while his deaf crew row past.
The whole episode is thirty-five lines long. It has generated a disproportionate share of the poem's afterlife, and it contributes almost nothing to the map.
Why it matters for the atlas
It is the clearest example in the atlas of a name-based identification: the Sirenuse islets carry the name and nothing else supports the location.
Competing theories
- Speculative
The Sirenuse islets
Proposed by: Ancient geographical tradition · Antiquity
A tradition carried by a name. The islets off the Sorrentine peninsula have been called the Sirenuse since antiquity, which tells us what Greeks and Romans believed, not where the episode belongs.
The Sirens' island- TraditionLi Galli (the Sirenuse), the islets off the Amalfi coast, named for the Sirens in Italian tradition
- Primary textStrabo, Geography 1.2
What is disputed
Whether the islets were named after the episode or the episode located at the islets — a circularity that runs through most western identifications.
Questions
- Where is the island of the Sirens?
- Not established. Italian tradition attaches it to Li Galli off Amalfi; the atlas scores that 4/12.
- What do the Sirens actually offer?
- Knowledge. They sing that they know what happened at Troy and everything that comes to pass on earth, which is why the temptation works on this particular listener.
Sources
- Primary textHomer, Odyssey (trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb, 1919)
- TraditionLi Galli (the Sirenuse), the islets off the Amalfi coast, named for the Sirens in Italian tradition
- Primary textStrabo, Geography 1.2