On this alabastron (perfume bottle), a siren with outstretched wings wears a polos (cap or crown) on her thick black hair which flows down her back. She has a slight smile on her face and does not look particularly scary. But a siren was a monster that had the head, and sometimes the breast or arms, of a woman, and the wings and body of a bird. Waiting on cliff tops by the sea, she would use the beguiling beauty of her song to lure unwary sailors to their deaths on the rocks below.
Most famously, sirens appear in Homer’s Odyssey. On an epic quest, the hero Odysseus must sail past the island of the sirens, whose song no man can resist. To withstand their power, Odysseus orders his crew to stop up their ears with wax, and he is bound to the mast so he can hear the song without being ensnared by it.
In classical mythology, sirens, like many other female characters, are used to test the hero. In Greek art, however, sirens could also be employed as decorative devices, as figures with protective powers, or in funerary art as perpetual mourners.
