[18]
And having come to Circe he was sent on his way by her, and put to sea, and sailed past
the isle of the Sirens.1 Now the Sirens were Pisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepia, daughters of
Achelous and Melpomene, one of the Muses. One of them played the lyre, another sang, and
another played the flute, and by these means they were fain to persuade passing mariners
to linger;
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
1 As to the return of Ulysses to the isle of Circe, and his sailing past the Sirens, see Hom. Od. 12.1-200; Hyginus, Fab. 125. Homer does not name the Sirens individually nor mention their parentage, but by using the dual in reference to them （Hom. Od. 12.52; Hom. Od. 12.167） he indicates that they were two in number. Sophocles, in his play Ulysses, called the Sirens daughters of Phorcus, and agreed with Homer in recognizing only two of them. See Plut. Quaest. Conviv. ix.14.6; The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A. C. Pearson, iii.66, frag. 861. Apollonius Rhodius says that the Muse Terpsichore bore the Sirens to Achelous （Ap. Rhod., Argon. iv.895ff.）. Hyginus names four of them, Teles, Raidne, Molpe, and Thelxiope （Hyginus, Fab. praefat. p. 30, ed. Bunte）, and, in agreement with Apollodorus, says that they were the offspring of Achelous by the Muse Melpomene. Tzetzes calls them Parthenope, Leucosia, and Ligia, but adds that other people named them Pisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepia, and that they were the children of Achelous and Terpsichore. With regard to the parts which they took in the bewitching concert, he agrees with Apollodorus. See Tzetzes, Scholiast on Lycophron 712. According to a Scholiast on Ap. Rhod., Argon.iv.892, their names were Thelxiope, or Thelxione, Molpe, and Aglaophonus. As to their names and parents see also Eustathius on Hom. Od. 12. p. 1709, Scholiast on Hom. Od. xii.39, who mention the view that the father of the Sirens was Achelous, and that their mother was either the Muse Terpsichore, or Sterope, daughter of Porthaon.
Apollodorus. Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Includes Frazer's notes.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.