Character
The Sirens
Singers on an island · the voice no sailor can refuse
Singers on an island whose song no passing sailor can refuse — they sit in a flowering meadow heaped with the bones of the men who tried. What they offer is not beauty but knowledge: they claim to know everything that happened at Troy and everything that happens on earth. Odysseus stops his crew's ears with wax and has himself lashed to the mast so that he can hear them and survive it — exactly the kind of bargain he likes. Homer never says what they look like.
The bird-woman body is the Greek artistic convention, not Homer's — he never says what they look like. What he does say is that they sell knowledge, not beauty.