A terracotta figure found in a tomb in ancient Apulia shows a siren as most people never picture her: clawed feet, wings and a bird’s tail beneath a woman’s head and torso, placed there to guide the dead. This episode traces how that feathered psychopomp became a fish-tailed temptress with a mirror. It starts with contested etymologies linking the name to a binding rope or a swarming wasp, then follows the sirens’ origin as daughters of the river god Achelous and companions of Persephone who gained bird bodies either as a gift from Demeter or as punishment for failing to stop Hades.

The hosts cover the singing contest against the Muses that left the sirens plucked and grieving, Orpheus drowning out their song for the Argonauts, and Odysseus tied to the mast. Drawing on Jane Ellen Harrison, they argue the Homeric sirens offered omniscience rather than sex, paralyzing sailors who starved amid rotting corpses. The transformation to mermaids is tracked through the 8th-century Liber Monstrorum, bestiary illustrators who drew fish tails beside Latin text describing birds, the church’s addition of comb and mirror as emblems of vanity, Isidore of Seville’s reading of sirens as prostitutes, Dante’s dream in the Purgatorio, Jesuit debates over sirens on Noah’s Ark, and Enlightenment writers who reduced them to Sicilian singers.

• The city of Aptera, ‘featherless’, and the sirens’ plunge into the sea
• The sailor Butes, who heard a fragment of the song and was saved by Aphrodite
• How the sirens threatened nostos, the heroic homecoming, by freezing men in the past
• Manatees and dugongs as the source of Age of Exploration siren sightings
• Algorithms as modern sirens and the question of who holds the rope