The encounter is set in the waters near Sorrento — a name likely derived from the Latin Sirentum, or “Land of the Sirens” — situated on an idyllic stretch of Mediterranean coastline. In Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation, the scene was shot in the Aeolian Islands, off the coast of Lipari. Although Homer doesn’t make the point, the beguiling beauty of this setting would have added to the lure of the Sirens.
What makes this scene so significant is not only what it reveals about the character of Odysseus: It shines a brutal light on the human predicament.
Odysseus is warned in advance by Circe, the divine sorceress, about “the ravishing notes” of the Sirens. To hear their song is to be driven mad, into suicide. “Hear the music, if thou wilt,” she says, “But let thy people bind thee, hand and foot, to the good ship, upright against the mast.”
Odysseus is a man who knows his limitations. Although he wants to discover the secret of the Sirens, Odysseus heeds Circe’s counsel, ordering his men to fasten him tightly to a mast and to fill their own ears with wax to drown out their song. “If I then entreat and bid you loose me, make the bands more strong.”
What is the secret, soul-destroying power of the Sirens? They tempt their victims with their deepest desires. In the case of Odysseus, it seems, it is the desire for absolute knowledge of the history of his people and of the future. As the Sirens promise:
“He goes delighted hence a wiser man;
For all that in the spacious realm of Troy
The Greeks and Trojans by the will of Heaven
Endured we know, and all that comes to pass
In all the nations of the fruited earth.”
Here is an intimation of an ancient promise, an ancient conceit, appearing at the very beginning of the human story. “You will certainly not die,” the serpent told the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good from evil” (Genesis 3:4-5). The craving for knowledge as a means to attain power and domination: Here, through the centuries, is the source of countless oceans of human misery.
Whatever his flaws, Odysseus possesses enough self-knowledge to resist the fatal temptation. His humility, at that moment of testing, preserves his life and that of his men.
If the trial of the Sirens hints at the biblical account of man’s fall from grace, the entire narrative structure of The Odyssey recalls one of its central themes: the profound and universal longing to find our true home. The Greek word nostoi, the root of the word nostalgia, means “homecoming pain.”
Augustine, bishop of Hippo, appears to have Homer’s epic in mind as he writes of mankind’s desire to return to his spiritual home — and of the snares that threaten to derail him from his course. As he describes it in On Christian Doctrine (a.d. 426):
Suppose, then, we were wanderers in a strange country, and could not live happily away from our fatherland, and that we felt wretched in our wandering, and wishing to put an end to our misery, determined to return home . . . But the beauty of the country through which we pass, and the very pleasure of the motion, charm our hearts, and turning these things which we ought to use into objects of enjoyment, we become unwilling to hasten the end of our journey; and becoming engrossed in a factitious delight, our thoughts are diverted from that home whose delights would make us truly happy.
Herein lies the bitterness of the human condition: We carry the memory of Eden. Alienated and cut off from the only place that can bring lasting peace, we long to return.
“Such is a picture of our condition in this life of mortality,” writes Augustine. “We have wandered far from God.” Those who seek a place among God’s blessed, we are told, must not become entangled in the pleasures of life but rather view them as signposts to their true destination. “That is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.” Thus, the human tragedy can be reversed: There can be a final homecoming.
Perhaps this is the deepest reason for the enduring appeal of Homer’s story. The charm of a great myth is its power to reveal a great truth about our earthly journey. The yearning to be reunited with the source of all goodness and beauty — what C.S. Lewis called “our inconsolable secret” — appears to be one such truth. Looking back on his days as an atheist and materialist, Lewis believed that this desire launched him on a long spiritual odyssey, culminating in his conversion to Christianity.
“I had hoped that the heart of reality might be of such a kind that we can best symbolize it as a place,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy. “Instead, I found it to be a person.”
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Joseph Loconte is the director of The Rivendell Center in New York City and the author of The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933–1945. He also serves as a senior fellow with Sagamore Institute and as the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College.
