Odysseus is warned about the Sirens, who lure ships’ crews to their deaths. After negotiating their threat, they sail past Scylla and Charybdis, but all his crew are lost in shipwreck, and he ends up with Calypso for 7 years.
Etty
A strange ancient Greek myth of the creation of woman was hardly ever painted until the 19th century. Even then, only one depicted the crux of the story until it became popular late in the century.
They tried to lure Odysseus and his crew to their deaths, and the same with Jason and his Argonauts. With the head of a beautiful woman and the legs of a bird, their singing was alluring to sailors.
More rich narratives, including Titania and Bottom, Falstaff, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Odysseus, Satan, Lady Macbeth, and Fairy Mab.
Stories involving swimmers, including Hero and Leander, the Ship of Fools, and a poem by Thomas Gray, with paintings by Bosch, Rubens and others.
The double pipe with reeds played by Marsyas in his doomed contest with Apollo, blown by the Sirens, and more.
Orientalism, a duel in fancy dress, gladiators in the Colosseum, the assassination of Julius Caesar, and the cynic Diogenes.
Odysseus is lashed to the mast as his ship passes the Sirens without being lured away. He’s the only survivor after shipwreck, then is trapped with Calypso for seven years.
Byron, no stranger to forbidden love, swam across the Dardanelles in 1810, retracing the strokes of the legendary Leander who died trying to reach his lover Hero.
The modified myth of Pandora remained popular well into the 20th century, when it must have seemed even more appropriate with war and pandemic.
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