Dante, Vergil, and the Case of the Disappearing Sirens

Amy Vail (Baylor University)

The Sirens of the Odyssey pose a very real threat to Odysseus, for what they promise the hero is the very thing he most longs for: information.  Whether or not they really draw men to their dooms cannot be known for sure: Odysseus himself does not say that he saw a heap of rotting human bones, only that Kirke, herself not necessarily a reliable narrator, had told him of one (Od. 12.45-6).  Yet Kirke may have invented the whole story, not wishing her lover to be enchanted by the Sirens.  The Sirens do seem to have the power to calm the wind, ensuring that passing sailors will hear them (Od. 12.167-8). They assure Odysseus that those who listen to them always depart happier and wiser (Od. 12.187-8).  Odysseus, however, learns nothing from the Sirens, and the only lasting pleasure he gets out of hearing them is the joy of having outwitted them (Powell 2004).

Vergil took the threat of the Sirens seriously.  At Aeneid 5.838, Palinurus is technically killed by Somnus, but when Aeneas finds his empty boat drifting, it is moving toward the home of the Sirens.  Homer’s Sirens had sung from a meadow, but the Vergilian Sirens live on spooky cliffs, white with bones.  Vergil, at any rate, considered Kirke a reliable narrator.  Beneath the dangerous cliffs, the waves roar ceaselessly.  Tum rauca adsiduo longe sale saxa sonabant (Aen. 5.866).  The alliteration is striking, almost onomatopoetic.  The Sirens remain off stage, however, and their songs go unheard.  Kyriakidis (1998) noted that according to Hellenistic sources, the Sirens must die once Odysseus hears their song and escapes.  That Aeneas approaches a Homeric landscape, now empty of an ancient threat but still forbidding, and then steers away from it to Italy might therefore be a generic clue: the poet and the epic itself are turning their backs on Odysseus’ world (Kyriakidis 1998).  Yet Palinurus’ death might also be read as a foreshadowing of Aeneas’ decent to the underworld (Putman 1962), surely a traditional heroic katabasis, and as McKay noted, a parallel for the death of Elpinor in the eleventh book of the Odyssey (McKay 1967).  Both deaths reveal the peril of ill-timed sleep.

Dante agreed with this idea, for he himself revisited the last of the Sirens, only to slay her.  In Canto 19 of the Purgatorio occurs the only secular song in all of the Divine Comedy.  Dante has just seen the spirits of slothful Trojans in Sicily, and is suddenly overcome with drowsiness.  Half asleep, he dreams of an ugly woman who stammers, but when he gazes on her, she becomes beautiful and capable of not only speech but also song.  She tells him that she is the Homeric Siren, but immediately follows up that assertion with a bald-faced lie: she claims that she turned Odysseus aside.  Odysseus, of course, did escape the tempting song of the Siren.  In addition, there is more than one Siren in the Odyssey, but Dante’s Siren asserts that she is the only one, the sole tempter of Odysseus, emphasizing this by repeating the words “Io son. (Purg. 19.19)”

Vergil magically perceives the content of Dante’s dream.  Reaching into the poet’s vision, he tears off the Siren’s clothes and exposes her belly, releasing a terrible stench.  This destroys the illusion and brings Dante to his senses.  The Siren, for all she reiterates “Io son!, Io son!” is not really there at all: she is nothing but a vision or a nightmare.  A poet created her, and a poet can destroy her.