ions with wax, and
causing himself to be fastened to the mast of his ship, which, he adds,
plunged them into so deep despair, that they drowned themselves in the
sea, where they were transformed into fishes from the waist downwards.

Others, who do not look for so much mystery in this fable, maintain that
the Sirens were nothing but certain straits in the sea, where the waves
whirling furiously around seized and swallowed up vessels that
approached them. Lastly, some hold the Sirens to have been certain
shores and promontories, where the winds, by various reverberations and
echoes, cause a kind of harmony that surprises and stops passengers.
This probably might be the origin of the Sirens' song, and the occasion
of giving the name of Sirens to those rocks.

Some interpreters of the ancient fables contend, that the number and
names of the three Sirens were taken from the triple pleasure of the
senses, wine, love, and music, which are the three most powerful means
of seducing mankind; and hence so many exhortations to avoid the Sirens'
fatal song; and probably it was hence that the Greeks obtained their
etymology of Siren from a Greek word signifying a _chain_, as if there
were no getting free from their enticement.

But if in tracing this fable to its source, we take Servius as our
guide, he tells us that it derived its origin from certain princesses
who reigned of old upon the coasts of the Tuscan sea, near Pel{=o}rus
and Caprea, or in three small islands of Sicily which Aristotle calls
the isles of the Sirens. These women were very debauched, and by their
charms allured strangers, who were ruined in their court, by pleasure
and prodigality.

This seems evidently the foundation of all that Homer says of the
Sirens, in the twelfth book of the Odyssey; that they bewitched those
who unfortunately listened to their songs; that they detained them in
capacious meadows, where nothing was to be seen but bones and carcasses
withering in the sun; that none who visit them ever again enjoy the
embraces and congratulations of their wives and children; and that all
who dote upon their charms are doomed to perish. What Solomon says in
the ninth chapter of Proverbs, of the miseries to which those are
exposed who abandon themselves to sensual pleasures, well justifies the
idea given us of the Sirens by the Greek poets, and by Virgil's
commentator.

[Transcriber's Note:

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