This enables the observer to understand Odysseus’s mortality as he gives in to the call of the Sirens, reinforcing the fact that he is susceptible to the same faults as his human brethren.
Odysseus’s head is the only thing he can move, and so it is tilted upward, so that he may hear all that the Sirens sing to call to him, and thus come closer to them. The creator of this vase chose to show Odysseus strapped to the mast of his ship, looking up at the Sirens overhead. A vase painting is a snapshot image of a myth where the artist must choose a single moment in which to encapsulate the entire narrative. The red figure vase painting of this same mythos allows for a wider breadth of interpretation than analysis of the text can provide. Moreover, since the Sirens’s song represents both the Iliad and a loss of nostos, by listening to the song and escaping the Sirens, Odysseus is once more proving that his heroic narrative is superior to that of Achilles since he gets both kleos and nostos. By showing that the Iliad is encapsulated by the Odyssey, the singer is asserting that Odysseus is more of a hero than Achilles, namely that his song and his kleos is more than what Achilles achieved. Everyone who listened to the Odyssey was also familiar with the Iliad and so would understand this allusion. The Odyssey is in constant competition with the Iliad, as Odysseus, a secondary character in the Iliad gets his own kleos and his own epic song. The audience hears the song that the Sirens sing to Odysseus within the performance of the Odyssey, in which the Sirens are offering to sing what is essentially the entirety of the Iliad: In other words, those who listen to the song of the Sirens are denied their nostos and thus Odysseus must avoid falling prey to their distractions. Unaware and hears their voices will never againīe welcomed home by his wife and children In the beginning of scroll 12, when Circe first tells Odysseus about the Sirens, she stresses that Furthermore, this paper takes into account the significance of the vase painter’s one snapshot image of this tale and how one can compare these two representations of this mythos. The purpose of this essay is to consider why the crucial episode of the Sirens in Odyssey scroll 12 is seminal to understanding the Odyssey as a whole, and why what happens in the episode gets to the essence of Odysseus’ character as a hero.
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