Greek to Me: The Sirens
The Sirens never had tails. The Greeks painted them as birds, and the fish arrived a thousand years later.
The Sirens never had tails.
Homer never says what the Sirens look like: just two voices in a meadow, and a lot of bones. The vase painters filled in the rest, and on a jar from about 480 BC they are birds with women's heads. The fish tail turns up around AD 700, in a book of monsters from England that calls them sea girls with scaly tails, and it stuck: in French, Spanish and Italian a mermaid is still a siren. They did lose one singing contest, to the Muses, who made crowns from their feathers. The Siren would like it known that the Muses were flat.
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Greek to Me
Every episode, and a little about the girls, is on the series page.
See all the episodes
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