"Deaf as Ulysses to the Siren's Song": The Story of a Forgotten Topos [*].

Avaunt, Inchantress! - I am deaf as Adders;

Deaf as Ulysses to the Siren's Song,

Who strove in vain to lure him to Destruction.

Lewis Theobald

Richly suggestive on a variety of levels, Odysseus's encounter with the Sirens in Homer's Odyssey remains one of the best-known episodes in world literature. This article exhumes a once popular variant of that story and tells how wise Ulysses, contrary to the ancient myth, came to stop his own ears against all allurements.

In Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors 3.2, Antipholus of Syracuse finds himself irresistibly attracted to Luciana, who unbeknownst to him is the sister of his twin brother's wife Adriana. By the end of the scene, however, he is so thoroughly baffled by the behavior of that enchantress -- that "siren," as he calls her (3.2.47) -- that he vows, "I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song" (3.2.169). Similarly, in Venus and Adonis, Adonis protests against his lover's seductive rhetoric, "bewitching like the wanton mermaid's songs," and manfully declares, "my heart stands armed in mine ear / And will not let a false sound enter there" (777-80).

To present-day readers neither of these passages requires much explanation. Shakespeare obviously alludes to Odysseus's encounter with the Sirens in book 12 of Homer's Odyssey. Just as the Ithacan sealed his companions' ears against the Sirens' song, so Adonis and Antipholus intend to stop their own ears against bewitchment. But as The Comedy of Errors should remind us, intuitive identifications can spell trouble. For in the verses I just quoted, the unspoken referent is not so much the crew as the Greek hero himself.

The notion that Odysseus was deaf to the Sirens has been out of fashion so long that hardly anyone still remembers how self-evident it once seemed -- indeed, how largely this variant eclipsed Homer's story in Shakespeare's time. [1] Its prevalence seems all the more remarkable when we consider that the Homeric account was, in truth, at everyone's fingertips in the later sixteenth century. Even though an English translation of the Odyssey would not be available until George Chapman's of 1616, the classic tale of Ulysses and the Sirens was nonetheless common knowledge, thanks in part to so standard a handbook as Narale Conti's Mythologia, first printed in 1551. Quoting Homer extensively in the original and in translation, Conti recounts how Ulysses had himself bound to the ship's mast so he could listen to the Sirens in safety, while his men, their ears sealed with wax, rowed by as fast as they could (7.13). [2] We are not at all surprised, therefore, to come across instances in Elizabethan literature that bet ray knowledge of open-eared Ulysses. Thus Barnabe Googe explains in The Shippe of Safegarde (1569) that when Ulysses came upon the mermaids he was

Desirous for to heare this harmonie,

And to escape the daunger and the wo,

Stopped vp his seruants eates with waxe, and fast

Caused them to binde himselfe vnto the Mast.

(C6r)

Allegorically retracing Ulysses' wanderings in book 2 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Sir Guyon passes by the mermaids with appreciative ear and is restrained from heeding them only by the Palmer's "temperate aduice" (2.12.30-34). In the verse dialogue "Vlisses and the Syren" (1605), Samuel Daniel even has that indomitable hero engage in a spirited debate with the Siren, defender of joyous, if ignoble ease (1:270-72). Hearkening Ulysses may perhaps also be discerned in Humfrey Gifford's "For a Gentlewoman" (1580), a poem in which the speaker abjures women's false love:

Like as Vlisses wandring men,

In red seas as they past along,

Did stoppe their eares with waxe as then,

Against the suttle Mermayds songue.

So shal their crafty filed talke,

Here after finde no listning eare,

I will byd them goe packe and walke,

And spend their wordes some other where.

(105)

As the reader will doubtless have noticed, Gifford's phrase "Did stoppe their eares ... Against the suttle Mermayds songue" closely resembles Anripholus's "I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song" -- so closely, in fact, that we might well regard it as the model for Shakespeare's line. But, you will protest at once, if that is really the case, then the referent in Antipholus's verse can only be "Vlisses wandring men." Or to put it differently: If Shakespeare did indeed recall Gifford's words, he must also have associated the stopping of ears with Ulysses' crew, and not (as I asserted earlier) with the Ithacan himself. Even if his knowledge of Homer's story was a bit vague on this point, he surely would have taken Gifford's hint and inferred that Ulysses kept his own ears open to the Sirens.

Such an objection, I grant you, seems plausible enough -- but only so long as we imagine that Shakespeare shared our preconceptions. What if he already knew for a fact that Ulysses sealed not just his comrades' ears but also his own? In that case he would have interpreted Gifford's lines quite differently from the way you and I have been trained to read them. To him, in short, the phrase "Like as Vlisses wandring men" would not have excluded Ulysses at all. Indeed, but for the meter Gifford might equally well have written, "Like as Vlisses and his wandring men." And for all we know, that is what Gifford himself intended to say.

We can make the same argument wherever the motif of open-eared Ulysses is suppressed in Renaissance literature, as it often is. Sir Thomas Elyot's Bibliotheca Eliotae (1542), for instance, reports that Ulysses plugged up his crewmen's ears and had himself bound to the mast, but leaves it to the reader to decide what that pillar of prudence might have done with his own ears: "Ulysses ... stopped the eares of all his company, to the intente they shoulde not heare the songes of Sirenes, and caused him selfe to be bounde to the mast of a shippe, and so escaped." [3] We find similar wording in Vincenzo Cartari's well-thumbed handbook, The Images of the Gods (1556). [4] Stephan Batman's The Go/den Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577) is equally silent about Ulysses' hearing: " Vlysses ... caused all his Saylers and Souldiers to stop their Eares, and him selfe to be bound to the Maste of his Ship. By which Policy, hee escaped the perill" (15r). The pattern is repeated in Abraham Fraunce's The Third part of the Countes se of Pembrokes Yuychurch (1592): "Ulysses ... commaunded his companions to stop their owne eares with wax, and then fasten him to the mast of the ship, least that inchaunting melodie might be their bane" (22v).

In perusing these boiler-plate explanations, which all go back to the same medieval source, [5] the modern reader takes it for granted that they necessarily imply an actively listening Ulysses. But this presumption, so instinctive to us, was by no means so commonsensical in the Renaissance, as we can learn, for example, from the headmaster of Eton, Nicholas Udall. In 1542 Udall published a translation of Erasmus's Apophthegmes bristling with helpful annotations. In one of these notes the schoolmaster explains: "Ulysses ... stopped the eares of all his coumpaignie with waxe, and caused hymselfe to bee fast bound to the mast of the shippe, and so escaped from the Sirenes, as Homerus writeth." Are we to infer that Udall's Ulysses leaves his own ears open? I think not. For immediately above this note the main text states: "Ulysses ... stopped his eares with waxe, and by that meanes in sailing, passed awaye by the monstres of the sea called Sirenes (in englishe mermaides)." [6]

The mind-set that so easily yokes Homer's story with its unhomeric variant can even be observed in Conti's great compendium. As I mentioned earlier, Conti read the Odyssey in the original Greek and hence relates the story of Ulysses and the Sirens exactly as Homer has it. But to Conti, retelling the literal level is merely the start of his labors. His real aim is to uncover layer after layer of moral wisdom in the pagan myths. Accordingly, after reviewing several older interpretations, he gives it as his own belief that the Sirens stand for the sensual pleasures and their titillations ("voluptates et earum titillationes"). The prudent, therefore, should follow Ulysses' example either by sailing past these temptations with open ears, while remaining bound to the mast of reason, or better yet, by stopping their ears to the shameful allurements of human life ("ad turpia humanae vitae lenocinia ad Ulyssis exemplum aures obturet opus est"). [7] That these alternatives plainly contradict each other does not embarra ss Conti a bit. To him and his cultivated contemporaries the old pagan myths had value only when they could be turned into moral allegories; and on that level the one version was just as good as the other.

When we now scour English Renaissance literature in quest of deaf Ulysses, we soon find that worthy turning up in all sorts of places, tightly bound to the mast of reason and virtue, wholly impervious to the siren songs of this world, and everywhere outvying his ancient counterpart in popularity.

Let us look first at drama. Protea, in John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis 4.2, disguises herself as an old man in order to warn Petulius against a seductive siren: "I am the ghost of Ulysses, who continually hover about these places where this Siren haunteth, to save those which otherwise should be spoiled. Stop thine ears, as I did mine." In George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston's Eastward Hoe the headstrong Touchstone rejects his family appeals with the words, "I will sayle by you, and not heare you, like the wise Vlisses" (5.4.1-2). A few lines later he adds: "Away Syrens. ... I am deafe, I doe not heare you; I haue stopt mine eares, with Shoomakers waxe" (5.4.7-16). Praising the Duke of Biron in Chapman's Byron's Tragedy, King Henry IV says that the Spaniards who tried to bribe the hero "found him still I As an unmatch'd Achilles in the wars, / So a most wise Ulysses to their words, / Stopping his ears at their enchanted sounds" (1.1.77-80). [8] According to Lysander in Chapman's The Widow's Tears, " Penelope is not so wise as her husband Ulysses, for he, fearing the jaws of the Siren, stopped his ears with wax against her voice" (1.2.13-15). In Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair Busy puts Win-wife on guard against the hucksters: "The Heathen man could stop his eares with wax, against the harlot o' the sea: Doe you the like, with your fingers, against the bells of the Beast" (3.2.46-48). Sir William Alexander writes in The Alexandraean Tragedie: "He quickly did mistrust the purpos'd wrong, I And from my Messengers he barr'd his eares, / As did Vlysses from the Syrens song" (3.1). Thomas Heywood's Londons Ius Honorarium advises the new mayor to remain deaf to the temptations of high office: "Yet like Vlisses, doe but stop your eare / To their inchantments, with an heart sincere." [9] The jealous Honoria avers in Philip Massinger's The Picture: "If he shut his eares, / Against my Siren notes, Ile boldly sweare / Vlysses liues againe" (2.2.418-20). Mr. Hodgefeild in Thomas Neale's The Warde professes himself "rav ished" with Saena's "sweet tones," the loveliness of which so surpasses the Sirens' singing that Ulysses himself would have unsealed his ears at once:

The sirens come behind thee; & ulisses

if thou hadst sang before his leaky ship

had quickly pulld the waxe out of his eares,

and heard thy musique, without Panique feares.

(3.3.941-44)

And the prince in Richard Flecknoe's Erminia laments that Erminia is as deaf to his wooing as Ulysses was to the Sirens: "Ulysses to the Syrens cod be no more, / against whose charms / he obstinately stopt his ear" (2.7).

Deaf Ulysses was a favorite also of lyric poets. Introducing his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1567), Arthur Golding warns his more stritlaced readers either to imitate " Vlysses feat ageinst the Meremayds song shutting their ears and eyes to the improprieties in the book, or else to hold the translator blameless:

If any stomacke beso weake as that it cannot brooke,

The liuely setting forth of things described in this booke,

I giue him counsell too absteine vntill he bee more strong,

And for too vse Vlysses feat ageinst the Meremayds song.

Or if he needes will heere and see and wilfully agree

(Through cause misconstrued) vntoo vice allured for too bee,

Then let him also marke the peine that dooth therof ensue,

And hold himself content with that that too his fault is due.

(A4r) [10]

George Turberville, in "Disprayse of Women that allure and loue not," monishes men to ignore all lovely temptresses: "Wherefore let be our care / Vlysses trade to trie: / And stop our eares against the sounde / of Syrens wi they crie" (61r; reprint, 151). He repeats the advice in "To his Friend T: hauing bene long studied and well experienced, and now at length louing Gentlewoman that forced him naught at all." As Ulysses ignored Circe's humanizing charms and the Sirens' pleasant, but noxious songs, Turberville's friend is to seal his ears and eyes against wanton desire:

Hast thou not read how wise Vlysses did

Enstuffe his eares with Waxe, and close them vp,

Of Cyrces filthie loue himselfe to rid,

That turnd his Mates to Swine by Witches cup?

And how he did the lyke vpon the Seas

The pleasant noysome Syrens songs tendure,

That otherwise had wrought him great vnease

If once they mought his mates and him allure?

Put thou the Greekes deuise againe in vre,

Stop vp thine eares this Syren to beguile,

Seale vp those wanton eies of thine, be sure

To lend no eare vnto hir flattring stile.

(77r; reprint, 183) [11]

We find the same counsel in Thomas Howell's Newe Sonets, and pretie Pamphlets:

Here liue in loue: for thy behoue, let reason rule thy choyce:

so shalt thou weare: Ulisses eare, to shun the Syrens voyce,

Beware and care: before thou state, on womens painted eyes,

like Crocodiles: with poysoned smiles, they will thee cleane disguise. [12]

In his "Warning for Wooers, that they be not ouer hastie, nor deceiued with womens beautie," Clement Robinson cautions:

The Syrens times [i.e., tunes] oft time beguiles,

So doth the teares of Crocodiles:

But who so learnes Vlysses lore,

May passe the seas, and win the shote.

Stop eares, stand fast.

(44, lines 1243-47)

Geffrey Whitney notes in his A Choice of Emblemes that "wanton Love" brings us nothing but grief. He concludes:

Then stoppe your eares, and like Vlisses waulke,

The Syreenes tunes, the carelesse often heares:

Crocuta killes when shee doth frendly taulke:

The Crocodile, hathe treason in her teares. [13]

Siren songs and crocodile tears never did deceive King James VI of Scotland, or so John Burel tells us:

Vnto the crafty Crocadils flase teirs,

With confidence, thou nelier did confide,

O wise Vlisses, with thy waxit eirs,

That did eschew, the Cyren songs aside,

So weill thy selfe, thou did gouerne and gide:

Howbeid, occasioun oft times did procure,

From Cupids schots, thy corps wes keipit sure. [14]

Neither Sirens nor crocodiles (or, for that matter, venomous snakes) are of any concern in the ideal landscape limned in Robert Chester's Loves Martyr (a book to which Shakespeare, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson all contributed verses):

Heare [i.e., Here] Mermaides sing, but with Ulysses eares,

The country Gallants do disdaine their teares.

The Crocadile and hissing Adders sting,

May not come neere this holy plot of ground.

(10-11; reprint, 18-19)

Henry Willoby's "modest maid" Avisa rejects the advances of a worldly nobleman by invoking the example of deaf Ulysses:

Well now I see, why Christ commends,

To louing mates the Serpents wit,

That stops his eares, and so defends

His hart, from luring sounds vnfit,

If you your madnes still bewraye,

I'le stop my eares, or goe my way.

Vlisses wise, yet dar'd not stay

The tising sound of Syrens song:

What fancie then doth me betray,

That thinke my selfe, so wise and strong;

That dare to heare, what you dare speake,

And hope for strength, when you be weake? [15]

Exhorting the reader to keep clear of passionate love, Edmund Prestwich marks that Ulysses escaped the bewitching Sirens only because he "was afraid / And (since he scap'd) may thank his timely fears / That taught him (e're he heard them) t'stop his ears." [16] Such wisdom comes too late for Thomas Watson, now that his mistress's singing has maddened him with love: "Through musicks helpe loue hath increast his might, / I stoppe mine eares as wise Vlisses bad, / But all too late, now loue hath made me mad" (B2v; reprint, 26). "E. C." likewise uses the topos to praise his lady in sonnet 24 of Emaricdulfe. Even wise Ulysses, he exults, would have been quite unable to resist her charms: "From her sweet words he could not stop his eare, / As from the Syrens and the Mermaids song" (B7v).

Other poets identify the Sirens with worldly allurements in general. To Charles Fitzgeffrey, Sir Francis Drake is a modern Ulysses who in his wisdom and goodness refused either to hear the Sirens' singing or to drink from Circe's enchanted cups:

[He] seal'd his eares, and lips up charili

Gainst Syrens songs, and Circes poisned drugs,

That metamorphose men too ugly hogs:

Nor Syrens songs, nor Circes drugs he feares,

Vertue had lock'd his lips, art seal'd his eares.

(Elr) [17]

In his discourse "Of the Soule of man, and the immortalitie thereof' Sir John Davies demonstrates that the sense of hearing can lead us morally astray and thereupon asks:

Did Sense perswade Vlysses, not to heare

The Mermaids songs, which so his men did please,

As they were all perswaded through the eare,

To quit the ship, and leape into the seas? [18]

And Josuah Sylvester, distrustful of "the sweet wonder of smooth words," urges readers to arm their ears against those blows:

'Tis therefore best our tender Eares to arme,

To shunne the danger of those deadly blowes:

Warie Vlisses so eschew'd the Charme 

Of those soule-rapting Impes of Acheloes.

(stanza 72, p. 697) [19]

Even so eminent a scholar as Roger Ascham did not hesitate to adduce deaf Ulysses. Speaking of the perils that a young Englishman might face while sojourning in Italy, he predicts in The Schoolmaster (1570): "Some Siren shall sing him a song, sweet in tune, but sounding in the end to his utter destruction." He therefore advises fathers to appoint a wise and honest guardian for their sons, lest the youths "run headlong into overmany jeopardies, as Ulysses had done many times if Pallas had nor always governed him, if he had not used to stop his ears with wax, to bind himself to the mast of his ship" (62-63). [20] Another great authority of the age, the Italian courtier Stefano Guazzo, cites the topos in his best-selling book on the social graces, La civil conversatione (1574). Here it is in George Pettie's translation of 1581: "But returning to the solitarinesse of the mind, I woulde have a wise man enter into it when he is in the company of the evil: from hearing whose talke hee ought to stop his eares, as Ulisses did against the song of the Marmaides" (1:51-52, emphasis added). [21] The italicized words are virtually the same as those used by Gifford in his Posie of Gilloflowers of 1580 and then adopted by Shakespeare when his Antipholus vows, "I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song." Guazzo's text, however, explicitly points to Ulysses.

We must now ask: Where does this commonplace come from? What accounts for its astounding popularity in Renaissance England? The answers lie in a version of the Ulysses story so suggestive and meaningful that it essentially rewrote the classic myth and displaced it for centuries on end. To learn how such a variant could arise we have to reach back into antiquity.

By about the fifth century BC, Greek philosophers were increasingly turning to the Homeric epics to seek support for their concepts. Though criticized by Plato, who banished their allegories and even Homer himself from his ideal state, they stoutly maintained that the old blind poet was a repository of all sorts of hidden knowledge, scientific, metaphysical, and moral. [22] During the fourth and third centuries the Stoics expanded this tradition, mostly on the ethical front. Indeed, they allegorized and moralized with such gusto that Odysseus turned into an exemplary wiseman, while the Odyssey, to quote W.B. Stanford's phrase, metamorphosed into "a kind of Stoic Pilgrim's Progress" (121). As time went on, many of these interpretations became topoi. Horace, for instance, draws on them in his Epistles, for there he characterizes the Odyssey as the story of virtue and wisdom and praises Ulysses' prudence in mastering the Sirens' songs and Circe's drugs:

Again, Homer has set before us a helpful example of what goodness and wisdom can do in the shape of Ulysses, the tamer of Troy, the man of vision, who studied the cities and manners of many peoples, and who, as he struggled home leading his men across the tracts of the sea, endured many a horror, yet never sank in the waves of adversity. You have often heard of the Sirens' song and Circe's cups; if he had been foolish and greedy enough to drink, like his comrades, he'd have fallen under the brutish degrading spell of a whore, living the life of a filthy dog or a wallowing pig. [23]

By the early Middle Ages the Stoic view of Ulysses and the Sirens was ingrained in every scholar. Thus the fifth-century mythographer Fulgentius contends, "Ulysses...both heard and saw, that is, recognized and judged, the Sirens, that is, the allurements of pleasure, and nevertheless passed by them." [24] And the Third Vatican Mythographer, writing several centuries later, neatly sums up a millennium's worth of tradition:

When Ulysses was about to sail past [the Sirens], he sealed his companions' ears with wax, fastened himself to the mast, and safely passed by them....The Sirens, therefore, are manifestly the bodily allurements....But the wiseman seals up the ears of his followers, lest they hear their songs, that is, he instructs them with salutary precepts, lest they be enmeshed in mundane delights. He himself, however, sails past them while bound to the mast, that is, while supporting himself by virtue. Though he discerns the allurements in all their worldly varieties, he despises them nevertheless and steers toward the fatherland of everlasting bliss. [25]

The allegorizing readings of the Odyssey proved attractive also to the church fathers in both east and west. To them wise Odysseus represented the true Christian or even Christ himself. Sailing in the ship of the Church and securely lashed to the cross, he hears the siren songs of the world -- be they heretical teachings, unbelief, or sensual delights -- but steadfastly rejects them in order to continue sailing to his true homeland, heaven. Of course the fathers recognized that few Christians are as wise or as strong in the faith as an Odysseus. Like Odysseus's comrades, such believers were admonished to plug up their ears, lest they fall prey to the devil's wiles.

How familiar this patristic interpretation remained in the later Middle Ages may be seen in the Speculum Ecclesiae, a collection of sermons compiled by Honorius of Autun in the first half of the twelfth century. In one sermon Honorius offers a detailed allegorization of Ulysses' confrontation with the Sirens. He concludes:

Ulysses is said to be the exemplary wiseman. He sails past [the Sirens] unscathed, because a Christian people that is truly wise floats in the ship of the Church over the sea of this world. He binds himself with the fear of God to the mast of the ship, that is, to the cross of Christ; he seals up the hearing of his companions with wax, that is, the Incarnation of Christ, so that they may turn their heart from vices and sensual desires and strive only after the things of heaven. [26]

Now as long as the ancient and patristic interpreters kept the Homeric narrative firmly in mind, their Odysseus never seals his own ears. It is only after the individual motifs were detached from their narrative context in the Odyssey and reduced to proverbial allusion that we first catch him defying tradition. For if, as proverbial wisdom tells us, the prudent do not wantonly expose themselves to temptation, but turn a deaf ear to blandishments of all kinds, [27] it was just a matter of time before the classical tale was streamlined to say allegorically that wise Odysseus was himself deaf to the Sirens.

It is interesting to see this line of thinking develop. Seneca represents the traditional Stoic view that we ought to dose our ears to the siren call of the world, just as Ulysses' crew did. In one of his Moral Epistles he advises Lucilius to continue pursuing all that is best and despising everything that is approved by the crowd. "You will be a wise man," he says, "if you stop up your ears; nor is it enough to close them with wax; you need a denser stopple than that which they say Ulysses used for his comrades." [28] Later writers, focusing more on the Ithacans' proverbial deafness, increasingly blur the line separating Ulysses from his men. To Juvenal the story merely illustrates a refusal to listen: "when Fortuna is asked to do something for me, she stops her ears with wax from that ship which escaped the Sirens' songs with deaf rowers.,, [29] Lucian's Nigrinus argues that any wiseman worth his salt ought to handle the amusements of Rome with more confidence than Odysseus did the Sirens, for that hero had to rely on rope and wax to keep him safe:

Don't suppose that there is any better school for virtue or any truer test of the soul than this city and the life here; it is no small matter to make a stand against so many desires, so many sights and sounds that lay rival hands on a man and pull him in every direction. One must simply imitate Odysseus and sail past them; not, however, with his hands bound (for that would be cowardly) nor with his ears stopped with wax, but with ears open and body free, and in a spirit of genuine contempt. [30]

It is not until the fourth century, however, that we first find Odysseus unequivocally stopping his own ears. In his celebrated Address to Young Men on Reading Greek Literature Saint Basil agrees that a Christian may study the pagan classics, but warns the young against the example of wicked people in poetry. In those cases, he insists, we should seal our ears "no less than Odysseus did, according to what those same poets say, when he avoided the songs of the Sirens." [31]

Basil's version of the myth returns in the works of Saint Jerome. To Jerome the Sirens are a standard image for the sinful pleasures and specious heresies that Christians must shun at all costs. In his commentary on Micah, for instance, the saint reminds us to steer clear of heretics: "No one can pass by their [siren] songs except by plugging up his ear and escaping, so to speak, as a deaf man." [32] Similarly he writes in his preface to the book of Joshua: "we who are hastening to our homeland should pass by the deadly songs of the Sirens with a deaf ear." [33] In allusions like these Jerome rarely mentions Ulysses or his crew. On one memorable occasion, however, he adopts Basil's statement that the ancient wiseman sealed his own ears. For in his commentary to Jeremiah he speaks of "the Sirens' deadly song, which Homer's Ulysses is said to have avoided by stopping his ears.

Thus the process that first moralized the Homeric myth and then distilled it into proverbs ended by making Ulysses deaf to the Sirens. The same process, if not quite the same finality, can be seen at work in Jerome's contemporaries and immediate successors. Paulinus of Nola, for instance, affirms in one of his letters that anyone studying pagan literature and philosophy (and, indeed, all things temporal) must exceed the caution practiced by Ulysses. After conceding that the myth has become proverbial even among Christians, the bishop finishes his letter by saying: "We must flee these [Sirens] with even greater cunning than Ulysses' by sealing not just our ears but also our eyes and, as it were, sailing swiftly past them in spirit." [35] The fifth-century bishop Sidonius Apollinaris similarly draws attention to the proverbial quality of the myth. Of a young man who has done with sowing his wild oats Sidonius writes: "Stopping his ears, as they say, with Ulysses' wax, he has become deaf to the temptations of v ice and flees from the enchantments of shipwreck in the arms of a courtesan." [36] Hereafter deaf Ulysses recedes into the shadows for many centuries.

The first to bring him back seems to have been the Cistercian monk Galand de Reigny. In his Libellus proverbiorum (Little Book of Proverbs), written in the mid-twelfth century for the edification of monks and novices, Galand offers a series of maxims, parables, and proverbial stories, each with a brief moralization. Two of the "proverbs" draw on Ulysses' wanderings on his way home from Troy. We may pass over the one concerning the bag of winds (Odyssey 10.17-55) and go directly to the tale of Ulysses and the Sirens:

Likewise there was a man who, you will perhaps agree, was truly one of a kind. Once, when he sailed over the sea and heard the voices of the Sirens, he stopped his own ears and those of his companions with wax, for he was afraid that they, captivated by the sweetness of their singing and drawn in their direction, would suffer shipwreck. Now you should know that no one will ever cross the seas if he does not do exactly what he did.

The wax, produced by the virginal bee, signifies Christ. He closes the ears of our heart so that we, as we row through the tempests of this world, may nor be deceived by the sweetness of the carnal pleasures -- the Sirens' song, as it were -- and endanger our soul. Otherwise it is certain that none of us will ever sail to God. [37]

Later in the twelfth century the story has evolved somewhat, for in the verbum abbreviatum by the famed Parisian canon and theologian Peter Cantor (d. 1197) Ulysses' wax has been transmuted into pitch. Cantor compares flatterers to the Sirens and then recalls Saint Jerome's preface to Joshua:

These are the "Sirens sweet unto death." Concerning them Jerome said: "We who are making for our homeland should pass by the deadly songs of the Sirens with a deaf ear," by stopping our ears like the adder, by sealing them with pitch, just as Ulysses and his comrades did. [38]

Ulysses' "pitch" reappears at the end of a long allegorical interpretation of the Odyssey, composed in the early thirteenth century by the Cistercian monk Gunther of Pairis:

Just as [Ulysses] stuffed pitch in his own and in his comrades' ears and so escaped the Sirens' enchanting songs, in a manner of speaking, with deaf oarsmen: so we should stop our ears and, as it were, become deaf to everything corrupt, the hearing of which can drag us down into a shipwreck of morals, and ought to say with the Psalmist, "But I am like a deaf man, I do not hear." [39]

The same detail crops up in the vast Speculum morale, attributed to Vincent of Beauvais but actually dating from the first quarter of the fourteenth century. In a section on the five senses the author reviews the temptations that enter our mind through the ears and then cites the example of Ulysses:

Of Ulysses it is reported that, when he came over the sea by the places where the songs of the Sirens could be heard..., that wise man is said to have stopped his ears with pitch, lest he, drawn by the sweetness of their singing, should throw himself overboard. [40]

The exemplum is hereupon applied to people who are so enchanted by the sweet sounds of music, especially women's singing, that they fall into a life of sensual pleasure and thence into eternal damnation.

The reference to pitch, thus firmly established in clerical literature, returns in the first book of Petrarch's influential De remediis utriusque fortunae (1366). Addressing himself to someone who prides himself on his peacocks, Petrarch warns: "this pleasure of the eyes must be weighed against the disgust of the ears. Only flight or the pitch of Ulysses helps against the infernal horror of the shrieking." [41] When Thomas Twyne translated this sentence into English in 1579, he sensibly replaced the medieval "pitch" with the more classical "wax": "this pleasure of the eyes is requited with great weerysomnesse of the eares, agaynst the horriblenesse of whose most hellysh noyse, it were needeful for men to run away, or to stoppe theyr eares with Vlisses waxe" (85r).

Petrarch alludes to the story elsewhere too, but without mentioning either pitch or wax. In one of his Familiar Letters he tells us to eschew the facile amusements and set our sights on a higher goal: "we must stop our ears like Ulysses, so that we may navigate safely past the rocks of the Sirens into the port of glory." [42] And in the second book of his De remediis he consoles a person who has become deaf:

Nature or circumstance has given to you the safeguard that was given to Ulysses, so that you too can sail safe from the song of the Sirens and consider yourself fortunate. How many dangers your mind might be exposed to otherwise, how many lies, how many errors, and, last, how many vexations might have entered it this way! [43]

Or, to quote from Twyne's Elizabethan translation:

Now that Arte whiche is reported to haue auayled Vlisses, eyther nature, or some chaunce hath geuen vnto thee, in that thou hast safely passed the singyng of the Sirenes with deafe eares, whereby thou oughtest to accompt thy selfe happie. For howe many daungers that wayes myght haue passed into thy minde? Howe many errours, and finally, howe many troubles myght haue entred into thy head? (289r)

As we have seen, the idea that Ulysses was deaf to the Sirens became possible only after the individual motifs had been thoroughly allegorized and turned into proverbial allusions. We do well to remember, however, that even as this process unfolded, mythographers, churchmen, and romancers never ceased telling the traditional story. In time the two traditions -- the allegorical-proverbial and the narrative traditions -- were fused to create a new, unhomeric story of Ulysses' adventure with the Sirens.

This step occurred in the Historia destructionis Troiae by Guido delle Colonne. The book, completed in 1287, took Europe by storm. During the next five centuries it was copied and recopied, printed in edition after edition, and translated into every major language, often in multiple versions. In England, for example, the work was translated almost immediately as The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Tray. John Lydgate produced another version in his Troy Book. This was followed by William Caxton's The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye -- the first English-language book ever printed.

Though Guido never acknowledges it, his Historia is actually a reworking of Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie of about 1160. Benoit's romance in turn draws on two supposedly eyewitness accounts of the Trojan war by "Dictys of Crete" and "Dares the Phrygian," the former composed toward the end of Nero's reign and translated into Latin in the fourth or fifth century, the latter written sometime after the Latin Dictys appeared. [44] Since both Dictys and Dares disdain all mythological machinery and provide a pointedly anti-homeric version of the war, they were considered far more authoritative than Homer's epics and so became standard reading in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

For the history of the Trojan war, Benoit could rely on Dares. For Ulysses' subsequent travails he had to turn to Dictys, embellishing that often spare narrative with details of his own devising. Thus the bald statement in Dictys's Ephemeris belli Troiani (6.5) that Ulysses eluded the Sirens through his cunning ("per industriam") grows into a colorful episode in the French romance. As Ulysses and his crew headed toward the Sirens, the hero heard five hundred of them singing. Ulysses, Benoit continues, was able to counter their enchantments with his own arts, such that none in his company could hear their songs. Hence the men were able to fall upon the Sirens unscathed and kill over a thousand of them. [45] Now in Guido's retelling of this episode, Benoit's statement that no one in Ulysses' company could hear the Sirens' singing is expanded to say that Ulysses stopped his own ears as well as the ears of his crew:

And so I[Ulysses] came upon these Sirens, and lest my comrades and I should be lulled into... fatal drowsiness, I used my wits and stopped my own ears as well as theirs so firmly that I and my crew heard absolutely nothing of their song. Instead we fought it out with them and slew over a thousand of them. [46]

By the late Middle Ages, therefore, deaf Ulysses was solidly entrenched not only in proverbial allusions but also in an exceedingly popular narrative. At the same time he was turning up increasingly as an exemplum in sermons. We can gather this not only from Galand's Little Book of Proverbs, but also from the other homiletic works that I mentioned, including the encyclopedic Speculum morale. To this evidence we can add the fourteenth century exemplum collection Gesta Romanorum. Certain manuscripts of the book tell how there were three Sirens, the one making music with a cythara, the second with a lyre, and the third with a human voice. Because their music made sailors so drowsy that they became an easy prey for those monsters, Ulysses stopped his own ears ("Ulixes... obturavit aures suas") and so escaped. The chapter ends with the moralization:

The three Sirens are the three things in the world that incite us to sin, namely the flesh, the world, and the devil. The three songs are pleasures, riches, honors .... But against these temptations you must close your ears... But only Ulysses passed by them and escaped. In this way any humble person, as signified by Ulysses, will be able to escape those three Sirens. [47]

John de Bromyarde adduces the exemplum twice in his Summa praedicantium, a huge manual for preachers written in the second half of the fourteenth century. At the end of the section on hearing, Bromyarde says that Christians should stop their ears against the devil and his minions; for just as travelers who pass through fetid places seal their noses against the stench, so we should seal our ears against wickedness. To drive the point home he introduces the story of Ulysses and the Sirens:

An exemplum to this effect is told in the fables. When Ulysses was about to pass by a place in the sea where the Siren deceived all the passers-by with her singing, he plugged up his ears and so escaped the danger. Do you likewise plug up your ears, and do not listen to the tongue of the wicked. (Sirach 28) [48]

And in his chapter on the cross Bromyarde recalls the old patristic interpretations, but updates them for his medieval audience:

Well then, just as Ulysses, who according to the fables, being about to pass by the places in the sea where the Sirens sang, plugged up his ears lest he should take delight in the sweetness of their song and bound himself to the ship's mast lest he somehow be deceived by them and swept into the sea, and just as someone fleeing to a church and seeing the enemies coming to rob him clasps a crucifix: so anyone who ventures to set sail over the Mediterranean sea of this world should close his ears and the other senses against all things illicit, flee to Christ and the cross and embrace the cross. [49]

Regular use of the Siren myth as an exemplum in English and continental preaching no doubt contributed much to the popularization of the topos of deaf Ulysses. So did Saint Basil's Address to Young Men, after Leonardo Bruni translated it into Latin in the early fifteenth century. As you will recall, Basil was the first to insist that Christian readers should follow Odysseus's example by stopping their ears against all evil influences in pagan literature. Now the Address was back in circulation, arriving at just the right time to lend its weight to an increasingly prevalent image. Here is the pertinent passage in Bruni's translation: "... fugienda est illorum imitatio auresque claudende [sunt], non secus atque ipsi ferunt Ulyssem ad Sirenum cantus" (we must avoid imitating them [i.e., the wicked examples] and stop our ears, just as they say Ulysses did against the songs of the Sirens). [50] Basil's text, I should add, was widely read not only in Bruni's version but also in the vernacular translations made from it and was even used as a schoolbook during the Renaissance. Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) was among those who closely studied the Latin text, for he quotes the aforesaid passage word for word in a letter of 1463 and then explicitly mentions Bruni's translation. [51] And in his treatise on the education of children (1450) he declares: "at all indecent talk we should follow the example of Ulysses, who put wax in his ears to avoid hearing the Sirens' songs.,, [52] From here it is just a step to Guazzo's La civil conversatione.

By the late-fifteenth century deaf Ulysses was a familiar figure in European literature. Dominicus Mancinus's poem on the four cardinal virtues (1484) -- a work translated as The Mirrour of Good Maners by Alexander Barclay in 1520 and as A plaine Path to perfect Vertue by George Turberville in 1568 -- praises wise Ulysses for closing his ears to flatterers: "It is difficult to shut one's ears to blandishing words; and this accomplishment is considered an uncommon feat. The Sirens that Ulysses spurned are to my mind none other than flattering tongues. These are monsters enough." [53] The fable of the raven and the fox teaches the very same moral, as Bartholomew of Cologne points out (1491): "The wiseman shuns sweet blandishments as if they were honey-covered poison and keeps clear of flatterers. Wily Ulysses passed by the enchanting songs of the Sirens by plugging up his ears with wax." [54] Sebastian Brant brings up the topos twice. In his bestselling Narrenschiff (1494) he reminds the reader: "Whoever hopes to escape the ship of fools must have his ears stopped with the wax that Ulysses brought along on the sea when he saw the host of Sirens and evaded them through his wisdom." [55] Though Brant does not explicitly mention that Ulysses used the wax to seal his own ears, his reference to "the host of Sirens" recalls the story told in Guido's Historia destructionis Troiae, according to which the hero stopped his own ears as well as those of his men and thereupon proceeded to slay over a thousand Sirens. Furthermore, Brant's emphasis on Ulysses' wisdom here and elsewhere in the Narrenschiff and his intimate knowledge of Basil's Address to Young Men make it highly probable that his Ulysses too is deaf to the enticements of human folly. [56] Be that as it may, the hero's prophylactic deafness is beyond doubt in Brant's drama of the virtues and vices, Tugent spyl (1512?). For there the stoically wise Ulysses is shown girding himself for the Sirens by telling his men:

"Reach me the wax. I want to stop my ears so I won't have to listen to them. I intend to tread this path of virtue." [57]

Another well-known German who used the exemplum is Ulrich von Hutten. In the dialogue Misaulus (1518) the headstrong knight satirizes life at court, the temptations of which only the wisest avoid: "Of the courtiers, there are some who imitate Ulysses. Sailing on this turbulent sea they stop their ears with wax and are deaf to the treacherous song of the Sirens." [58] Hutten's good friend, the Erfurt humanist Eobanus Hessus, tells a fellow student who has just been fleeced by a prostitute:

Haven't you heard how the sweet-sounding Sirens used to sing wondrously melodious songs to lull sailors to sleep, lure them nearby, and drown them in the sea? To avoid their cunning, we should imitate that wisest of men Ulysses, who came upon them on his way back from Troy. Forewarned by Circe, however, he barred the way for their fatal charms by stopping his ears with wax and having himself lashed to the ship. [59]

At the festivities that accompanied the wedding of Sigismund I of Poland to Barbara Zapolya of Hungary in February 1512, Eobanus was much taken with the choral music: "There wasn't just one Siren singing there, but all of them. If he could have heard them, Ulysses himself would have turned his ship back." [60] And in his Heroidum Christianarum epistolae (1514) he writes of Ulysses: "Had he not disdained to listen to the seductively melodious plaints [of the Sirens], he would have exposed himself and his crew to a wretched death." [61]

Of all the northern humanists, however, the one who brings up the commonplace most frequently was also the most renowned and influential: Erasmus of Rotterdam.

In his praise of monasticism, De contemptu mundi, composed in 1491 but not published until 1521, Erasmus sets out to persuade a "cousin" of his to abandon the stormy seas of this world by entering the monastery: "Ulysses, according to Homer a model of wisdom and perfection, barely made his escape from the Sirens' song despite taking great care to stop his ears with wax and have himself tied to the mast with a rope. What hope, then, remains for you?" [62] Sixteenth-century English readers knew this passage in Thomas Paynell's translation of 1533: "Homer reherseth, that Vlixes, the whiche representeth the person of a perfecte wyse manne, with great study and diligence coude scarsly scape the swete honygalle songe of these Syrens, and yet he stopped his eares with waxe, and bounde hym selfe to the shyppe maste. Than what hope haste thou to escape them?" (10r).

It is curious to see that Erasmus, who in later life was intimately acquainted with the Odyssey, not only adduced the unhomeric variant throughout his career, but kept asserting that this version was in fact Homeric. Thus in his Panegyricus ad Philippum (1504) he praises Philip the Handsome for taking no notice of sycophants: "To the deadly songs of such sirens as these, most noble Duke, you have both ears stopped up with wax, as the Homeric Ulysses did." [63] And in his Adages (1515) -- a book that Shakespeare almost certainly used -- Erasmus explains the proverb "You close your ears with wax" by relating it to Homer's myth: "Derives from Ulysses' wax, with which he, according to Homer, stopped his own ears as well as those of his comrades against the songs of the Sirens." [64]

In his equally successful Parabolae sive similia (1514), on the other hand, Erasmus includes the Ulysses image among those parallels based on Plutarch's Moralia: "As Ulysses stopped his ears with wax, and so sailed safely past the Sirens, so should we pass by anything in an author that is attractive but obscene." [65] The image does indeed go back to Plutarch, but only loosely.

For in the essay How the Young Man should study Poetry Plutarch refers only to Odysseus's crew, not to Odysseus himself, when he asks rhetorically, "Shall we then stop the ears of the young, as those of the Ithacans were stopped, with a hard and unyielding wax, and force them to put to sea in the Epicurean boat, and avoid poetry?" He goes on to argue that young people would be far better off if they were exposed to literature, provided they remained firmly bound to the standard of reason. [66] We are thus confronted here with one more example of that natural tendency -- not confined to Renaissance authors -- to read the familiar into the unfamiliar and involuntarily to supply details not overtly stated in the text at hand.

The simile occurs also in other widely read works of Erasmus's. One of the speakers in the Colloquies (1522) assures us that he skips all indecencies in the poets, "as Ulysses sailed past the Sirens with ears stopped." [67] And in his Apothegms (1531) Erasmus maintains that when Socrates urged his followers to flee carnal pleasures as they would the Sirens, the ancient philosopher was alluding "to Ulysses, who sailed past the Sirens with his ears stopped with wax." [68] The passage, as we saw, was first translated into English by Nicholas Udall in 1542.

According to a recent study, that "scourge of princes" Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) introduces deaf Ulysses in a satirical sonetto in order to poke fun at the Marquis of Vasto. The latter, apparently, was eager "to gain the support of the Venetian senators for an expedition against the Turks, and ... seemed to be especially given to the excessive use of perfumes. As a result, the senators were forced to 'seal' their noses as Odysseus 'had sealed his ears' against the Sirens." Sniffs the modern critic: "As even the most cursory reader of the Odyssey could have told Aretino, Odysseus of course did not stop his ears against the Sirens." [69]

Imagine for a moment that we had the chance to set Aretino straight on this point. Would he -- or for that matter an Erasmus or a Shakespeare -- have wanted to listen to us with open ears? Their version was so manifestly true, so fraught with meaning, that even Homer himself could not have torn them from the topos with which they had grown up: that Ulysses, wisest of men, was deaf to the Sirens' song.

EPILOGUE

As direct knowledge of the Odyssey increases in the later seventeenth century and the passion for moralization abates, one would expect the unhomeric version to disappear altogether. That, however, is by no means the case. The commonplace had become far too deeply ingrained, far too proverbial to fade into oblivion overnight. Indeed, we continue to run across examples of it well into the nineteenth and even the twentieth century. Let me start with British and American literature. In "The Hermit" (1693) Benjamin Hawkshaw dismisses the "fulsome Joys" of this world:

I'm now so well acquainted with you all,

I'll never listen to your Call;

I'll like Ulysses stop mine Ears,

And never hear the Syren's Charming Pray'rs. (42)

The perfect prince envisioned in Samuel Cobb's Poetae Britannici (1700) is, like Ulysses, "deaf to the Syrens of alluring ease." [70] "A Pindarick Ode" (1703) by Lady Mary Chudleigh contrasts "the thoughtless Many" who are drawn by the sirens of pleasure with "the more manly, and the brave" who let Reason guide their life. She thereupon cautions her readers:

Be like the wise Ulysses bound,

Pernicious Freedom shun,

Be deaf to ev'ry flatt'ring Sound;

The most are by themselves undone.

Very few, she adds, will ever have the strength of an Orpheus, who saved the Argonauts by competing with the Sirens and vanquishing them with his "superior Skill." [71] Stanworth in William Taverner's The Female Advocates 4.2 (1713) counsels Heartly to avoid the vintner Ned Ruby. "You must guard against him," he warns, "as Ulysses did against the Syrens; stop your Ears, or he'll lure you with." Lewis Theobald's Orestes rebuffs the advances of Circe by invoking Ulysses in Orestes 2.1 (1731): "Avaunt, Inchantress! -- I am deaf as Adders; / Deaf as Ulysses to the Siren's Song, / Who strove in vain to lure him to Destruction." In Charlotte Lennox's novel The Female Quixote (1752) Mr. Glanville complains that "those Ladies think it a mortal Injury done to their Charms, if the Men about them have Eyes or Ears for any Object but their Faces, or any Sound but that of their Voices: So that the Connoisseurs in Music, who attend them to Ranelagh, must stop their Eats, like Ulysses, when the Siren Frasi sings" (148). E. R. B. L. Lytton (Owen Meredith) adduces the topos twice. In his oft-reprinted poem Lucile (1860) he wonders:

Is, then, Life one vast question without a reply?

Must man, like Ulysses, with stopp'd ears sail by

Where'er Thought and Sense (Sirens only) sing to him

Songs over the deeps, that are sure to undo him

If once he should list to the music that mocks

The frail bark it lures to the whirlpools and rocks?

(1.6.22)

And in his Chronicles and Characters (1868) he says of a late renowned botanist:

Beauty peeps in at the casement, he savagely fastens the shutter:

Pleasure trips light at the threshold, he pushes the bolt in the door:

Fortune, red gold in her right hand, comes fearless with good news to utter,

He seals up his ears like Ulysses, and laughs at her, proud to be poor.

(94)

Mr. Farebrother, the vicar in George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-1872), also appears to allude to the commonplace. For when Lydgate refuses to go out in the evening, the vicar responds: "What, you are going to get lashed to the mast, eh, and are stopping your ears? ... Well, if you don't mean to be won by the sirens, you are right to take precautions in time" (bk. 3, chap. 31).

The topos retained its charm for nineteenth-century American authors too. George H. Boker's "The Lesson of Life" (1848) offers hope that youths will follow the "sage counsels" of old men,

So, like Ulysses, with their hearing stopped

By thy sage counsels, they may safely glide,

Intact and harmless, past the Syren sounds

Which every pleasure sings to lure astray.

(52-53)

Thomas H. Chivers likewise writes in his "tragi-apotheosis" The Sons of Usna (1858):

Your words sound sweet, but sadder far than sweet

To those who love, but cannot see their homes;

Like Siren's Songs to the rapt Mariners' ears,

Luring them down to speedy death! Then heed

Them not, Naisa; like the wise Ulysses did,

Put wax into thy ears, until we pass

This place -- this Paradise of heavenly songs.

(54)

And in Bayard Taylor's poem "Passing the Sirens" (1863) Ulysses instructs his men:

Me bind ye fast, here, at the mainmast's foot,

And stop my ears with wool, lest I should lose

The settled will that drives my purpose on,

And falter with slack sails, the shame of all,

Of ye, my men, and all who honored me,

Heroes and demigods, in Troy. For I,

Wiser than ye in scheming, stronger proved

In much endurance, have the keener sense

Of all delights and all indulgences,

The more temptation to forbidden lusts.

Let me not hear the singing from the isles,

Or see the Sirens, naked in the shade,

Spread their alluring couches!

(128-29)

On the European continent the topos reached its high-water mark in Filippo Picinelli's Mondo simbolico (1653). This popular encyclopedia of emblems -- it was reprinted five times in the vernacular and equally often in the augmented Latin translation by Augustin Erath (1681) -- brings together four versions of the emblem:

From Ulysses I should like you to learn that you must never lend your ears to the blandishments of the world, but must always keep them stopped. Standing in a ship close to the Sirens he bears the epigraph, "WITH STOPPED EARS."...

Ulysses within the ship tells the nearby Sirens: "SECURE IN DEAFNESS." For against the shameless advances of a prostitute you cannot triumph more securely than if you close your ears to their alluring invitations and your eyes to their loveliness. Hence the poet: "Ulysses escaped the Sirens with stopped ears. If you would escape this [siren], seal your ears and eyes." ...

The fathers of the Society of Jesus in Belgium adopt Ulysses as their emblem. Bound to the mast of the ship, he raises his hands to close his ears, while the choir of Sirens sings in vain around the vessel. The lemma reads: "YOU SING TO THE DEAF AND YOU SING TO THE BOUND."...

Ulysses prudently stopped his ears with wax, for the song of the Sirens was so alluring to those who sailed by them that they fell into the most profound sleep and once asleep were either dashed upon the rocks with their ships or drawn into the sea and killed, in such numbers that the shores were everywhere littered with the bones of the shipwrecked. You may subjoin this lemma from Claudian: "PLEASURE ITSELF WILL BRING DEATH." [72]

The German novelist and poet Laurentius von Schnuffis was obviously well acquainted with the tradition. In his half-mystical, half-autobiographical novel Philoteus (1665) a beautiful shepherdess declares her love for Mirant so sweetly that "even Ulysses, who had learned to shun the danger of those mermaids, would have had to lend an ear to her." [73] And in his emblematic poem Mirantisches Flotlein. Oder Geistliche Schafferey (1682) the shepherdess Clorinda (the soul newly awakened from sin) laments that Daphnis (Christ) will not listen to her pleas (1.3.14): "Daphnis hat, wie Ulyss, / Die Ohren dick verstopffet" (Daphnis, like Ulysses, has firmly stopped his ears). In section 2.4.3 Clorinda recalls that Daphnis earnestly warned her not to forfeit his love, but she foolishly paid no attention to him, "Dann ich gab' ihm nur Gehor / Mit Ulysses-Ohren" (For I listened to him only with Ulysses-ears). A footnote explains: "Ulysses hat seine Ohren mit Wax verstopfft" (Ulysses stopped his ears with wax). [74] The Fr enchman Simon Gueullette mentions the topos in his methode pour apprendre facilement la fable heroique (1692). [75] A century later Jean Dusaulx could still write in his Voyage a Barege (1796): "rappelez-vous que le prudent Ulysse se boucha les oreilles pour ne point entendre le chant des sirenes" (remember that the prudent Ulysses stopped his ears to avoid hearing the song of the Sirens). [76]

In the twentieth century the topos was resurrected by none other than Franz Kafka. His brief story "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" (1917) opens with the lapidary statement: "Um sich vor den Sirenen zu bewahren, stopfte sich Odysseus Wachs in die Ohren und lie[beta] sich am Mast festschmieden" (To save himself from the Sirens, Odysseus stuffed wax into his ears and had himself fastened to the mast). [77] The critics have much to say about the Kafkaesque deformation of the ancient myth. In this instance, however, Kafka has revived the unhomeric variant of the tale and made it his own.

(*.) This essay is dedicated to Clarence H. Miller. May he, a Ulysses in wisdom, nevertheless unstop his ears to these Sirens!

The article owes its existence to Germain Marc'hadour, who in the summer of 1997 urged me to contribute to Melanges Miller: Studies in Honor of Clarence H. Miller, ed. Katherine G. Rodgers and Stephen M. Foley, since published as Moreana 35(1998). But try as I might to meet his deadline, ripeness long proved elusive. The delay did, however, allow me to benefit from the perceptive comments of James C. Nohrnberg and an anonymous reviewer for Renaissance Quarterly. To each of these colleagues I offer my warmest thanks.

The following abbreviations are used in the notes and bibliography: ASD = Erasmus of Rotterdam, Opera omnia; CCSL = Corpus Christianorum, series Latina; CWE = Collected Works of Erasmus, PL = Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in this article are my own.

(1.) The first to notice the unhomeric version in English Renaissance literature was Parrott, 2:808, with two examples. Tilley adds three more instances and traces them back to Erasmus's Parabolae; cf. Bush, 28-29 n.4. Further examples are noted in Vredeveld, 1997, 591-93. A thorough survey of the Siren tradition from antiquity to the Renaissance (minus the variant discussed in this article) can be found in Rachewiltz and in Wednet. See also Stanford.

(2.) Conti is followed by Bacon, 126: "Ulysses sociis omnino aures cera obturari iussit. Ipse, cum experimentum rei facere vellet, periculum autem depellete. se ad malum navis alligari voluit" (Ulysses ordered his companions to stop up their ears with wax. He himself, because he wanted to have the experience while removing any danger, desired that he be bound to the mast of the ship). George Chapman was another Elizabethan who read Conti closely; see Schoell, 31 and 179-97. Of the Renaissance mythographers, Conti offers the most detailed information about Ulysses' encounter with the Sirens. Boccaccio, 7.20, does write at length about the Sirens, but has little to say about Ulysses. The same is true for Giraldi, 240.

(3.) Elyot, Ii 1r, article "Sitenes." The same wording is found in Cooper, Q1r.

(4.) Cartari, 132, chap. (Nettuno": "Vlisse ... fece legare se all'albero della naue, & a i compagni suoi fece chiudere le orecchie con cera" (Ulysses ... had himself bound to the mast of the ship and caused his companions' ears to be stopped with wax).

(5.) The source is Albricus, 4.6 [= Third Vatican Mythographer, 11.9]: "Per has [Sirenes] transiturus, Ulixes sociis aures cera obturavit, semet malo alligait, illesusque perttransivit" (When Ulysses was about to pass by these [Sirens], he stopped his companions' ears with wax, bound himself to the mast, and sailed by them unscathed).

(6.) Udall, 40r. The book was reissued in 1564. Let me add one other example. In his Satires, first published in 1534, Ludovico Ariosto comments misogynistically about wives: "se le contrasti, pan la pace a monte, / e come Ulisse al canto, tu l'orecchia / chiudi a pianti, a lamenti, a gridi et onte" (if you oppose her, then scatter your peace to the winds, and like Ulysses with the Sirens, stop up your ears to weeping and wailing and screams and abuses); see Ariosto, 5,139-41; trans. Wiggins. Ariosto does not expressly state that Ulysses stops his own ears. But the ambiguity, which we unthinkingly resolve in favor of the Homeric version, received quite a different interpretation at the hands of Gervase Markham in 1608: "If she should braule with thee maliciously, I Gouerne with patience her extremity. I And as Vlysses 'gainst the Syrens song, / Made himselfe deafe to shelter him from wrong; / So her expostulatings do not heare, I But 'gainst such clamorous noyse glew vp thine eare." I quote from the 1611 edit ion, where, however, the translation is attributed to Robert Tofte. See Tofte, 51. In a marginal note Tofte adds: "It is reported by Homer that Vlysses returning from the destruction of Troy, being at the Sea, inuironed with many Syrens or Mermaides, caused himselfe and all his souldiers to be bound to the masts of the ships, and to stoppe their eares, least the inchantment of their musicke should draw them to destruction."

(7.) Conti, 7.13. The story occurs again at Conti, 9.1, but there the motif of open-eared Ulysses is suppressed: "ad insulam Sirenum delatus aures sociorum cera illitas obturavit seque ad malum navis alligari iussit, ne suavitate cantus victus perimeretur" (having reached the island of the Sirens, he scaled up his comrades' ears with wax and ordered that he himself be bound to the mast of the ship, lest he be overcome by the sweetness of their song). Cf. also Conti, bk. 10, chap. "De sirenibus" (p. 548), recommending that we stop our ears to the siren song of illicit desires.

(8.) Henry's words come almost verbatim from Jean de Serres, Inventaire general de l'histoire de France, as translated in Grimeston: "As they had found him an Achilles in battayle, so they found him an Vlysses to their words, stopping his eares at their enchantments"; see Grimesron, 1100 (originally published in 1607).

(9.) Heywood, 1631, opening scene, B2r. The stage directions explain "that whosoever shall lend an attentive care to their [the Sirens'] musicke, is in great danger to perish; but he that can warily avoyd it by stopping his cares against their inchantment, shall not onely secure themselves, but bee their mine: This was made good in Vlisses the speaker. ... In him is personated a wise and discreete Magistrate" (Bir). In Gynaikeion, bk. 7, p. 365, Heywood again speaks of Ulysses as "stopping his owne eares and the eares of his saylers, with waxe (by the counsel of Mercurie) and causing them all to bee tyde to the Masts of the ship." That all the sailors are tied to the mast is, of course, odd. But what seems strange on the literal level makes good sense allegorically: you simply cannot be too careful when there are sirens around.

(10.) Shakespeare knew Golding's Ovid translation very well indeed. See Baldwin, 2:430-52 and, for example, Highet, 203-07.

(11.) Turberville's model is Horace, Epistles, 1.2.23-26. Similarly Whitney concludes the emblem "Homines voluptatibus transformantur" (People are transformed by pleasures) with the verse, "Oh stoppe your eares, and shutte your eies, of Circes cuppes beware" (82), and then adds Horace's Latin lines.

(12.) Howell, 1576, F3v. Crocodiles were popularly believed to shed false rears in order to attract their victims. Deaf Ulysses returns more covertly in Howell's Deuises, in a poem inveighing against flatterers: "As Saylers earst, by Sirens songs alurde, / Deuoured were that lackt Vlisses skill, / So Noble minds by such haue bene procurde, / To credite toyes, that turnde to greater ill. / The Serpent wise, to stop hir cares deemes meete, / When Charmer seemes to charme with voyce most sweete" (20). The concluding coupler points to Psalms 58.4-5.

(13.) Whitney, 219, under the heading, "In amore tormentum" (In love, torment). The crocuta (hyena) was thought to imitate the human voice in order to lure people our of doors and devour them.

(14.) Burel, K2v, "An Aplication Concerning our Kings Maiesties Persoun."

(15.) Willoby, 40 (canto 7). The Biblical allusions are to Matthew 10.16 and Psalms 58.4-5.

(16.) Prestwich, 113, "Answer to the former" (that is, to "A Remedy against Love").

(17.) Cf. Turberville's "To his Friend T," quoted above, with n.11. Similarly (if uncouthly) Hugo Holland draws "A parallel1 betweene Don Vlysses of Ithaca and Don Coryate of Odcombe": "Vlysses heard no Syren sing: nor Coryate I The Iew, least his praepuce might proue excoriate." See Holland, elr (front matter).

(18.) Davies, 28. To Davies the Sirens are so thoroughly allegorized as an emblem of temptation, irresistible to all except the truly wise, that he jettisons the traditional versions of the Sirens story and conflates the non-wise sailors of pre-Ulyssean times with the non-wise rowers on Ulysses' ship.

(19.) The Ulysses image is Sylvester's. The French original speaks of prizefighters who protect themselves with "aureillettes."

(20.) In the immediately following paragraph Ascham associates the mast with "God's word" and the Sirens' songs with the "enchantment of vanity."

(21.) Cf. Guazzo, 1:37: "Ma tornando alla solitudine dell'animo, io voglia che in questa si ritiri l'uomo di sana mente, non conversando fra i cattivi, a' quali dee chiuder l'orecchie, come Ulisse al canto delle Sirene." Sullivan, I :xlix, was the first to point out that Shakespeare's wording in The Comedy of Errors, 3.2.169, resembles Pettie's. According to Lievsay, Guazzo's La civil conversatione was "thoroughly familiar to Elizabethan and Jacobean Englishmen," either in the original or in translation (53). Though rightly dismissive of Sullivan's uncritical attempts to uncover reminiscences of Guazzo in Shakespeare, Lievsay, 143-44, does admit one such borrowing in 2 Henry VI, written a year or so before the Comedy of Errors.

(22.) On the history of allegorical Homer interpretations see Hanson, 56-62, Wedner, and Kaiser. For Plato's "banishment" of Homer and his rejection of the allegorical interpretations of his epics see Republic 2, 377D-3, 398B.

(23.) Epistles, 1.2.17-26; trans. Rudd, 133. Horace's reference to Circe as a "whore" goes back to an old rationalistic (euhemeristic) interpretation, according to which the Homeric divinities were actually men and women who had been deified after their death. Thus Cronos and Zeus were regarded as ancient kings, while Aphrodite, Circe, and the Sirens were said to have been courtesans. The explanation of the Sirens as prostitutes who robbed travelers of their possessions enjoyed wide currency throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in large part because of Servius's commentary on Vergil, Aeneid 5.864 (repeated in Isidore of Seville, 11.3.31): "secundum veritatem [Sirenes] meretrices fuerunt, quae transeuntes quoniam deducebant ad egestatem, his fictae sunt inferre naufragia" (in reality [the Sirens] were prostitutes who reduced the passers-by to poverty and were hence imagined to bring about shipwrecks). See Kaiser, 121-27; Courcelle.

(24.) Fulgentius, 2.8: "Ulixes...Sirenas, id est delectationum inlecebras, et audivit et vidit id est agnovit et iudicavit, et tamen transiit."

(25.) Third Vatican Mythographer, 11.9: "Per [Sirenes] transiturus Ulixes sociis aures cera obturavit, se malo alligavit illaesusque pertransiit....Sirenes igitur corporales illecebras evidenter designant....Sapiens autem aures suorum obturat, ne earum modulationes audiant, id est praeceptis eos salutaribus informat, ne saecularibus deliciis implicentur. Ipse vero malo alligatus transit, id est virtuti innitens, licet mundanarum varietatum illecebras sentiat, eas tamen contemnens in patriam sempiternae beatitudinis tendit."

(26.) Honorius of Autun, 857 A: "Ulixes dicitur Sapiens. Hic illaesus praeternavigat, quia Christianus populus vere sapiens in navi Ecclesiae mare huius saeculi superenatat. Timore Dei se ad arborem navis, id est ad crucem Christi, ligat; sociis cera, id est Incarnatione Christi, auditum obsigillat, ut a viciis et concupiscentiis cor avertant et sola coelestia appetant." The passage occurs also in Honorius's contemporary Wernerus S. Blasii, 849 A-B. For an analysis of the patristic interpretations see Rahner, 239-71; Wedner, 182-250.

(27.) Cf. Otto, nos. 213 and 1657; Haussler, 117.

(28.) Epistulae, 31.2; trans. Gummere, 1:223.

(29.) Satires, 9.148-50: "cum pro me Fortuna vocatur, / adfixit ceras illa de nave petitas / I quae Siculos cantus effugit remige surdo." Cf. Kaiser, 132, who also mentions the examples from Lucian, Basil, and Jerome's In Hieremiam.

(30.) Nigrinus, 19; trans. Harmon, 119.

(31.) Basil, 4.2; trans. Deferrari and McGuire, 4:389.

(32.) Jerome, 1969, 429: "Nec potest eorum cantica practerire, nisi qui obturaverit aurem suam, et quasi surdus evaserit."

(33.) Jerome, 1939, 8: "nos ad patriam festinantes mortiferos Sirenarum cantus surda debeamus aure transire."

(34.) Jerome, 1960, 119: "Sirenarum mortifero carmine, quae ut vitaret Ulixes Homericus, clausisse aures dicitur." Jerome refers to the siren song of the heretics.

(35.) Paulinus of Nola, 16.7: "Has [Sirenas] oporter ultra Ulixis astutiam cauti non auribus tantum sed et oculis obseratis et animo quasi navigio practervolante fugiamus."

(36.) Sidonius, 9.6.2: "Ulixeas, ut ferunt, ceras auribus figens fugit adversum vitia surdus meretricii blandimenta naufragii."

(37.) Galand de Reigny, 128 (no. 82): "Similiter unum tantummodo hominem fuisse forsitan putatis, qui per mare quondam navigans, cum Syrenarum voces audisset, suas suorumque sociorum aures cera obstruxir, ne scilicet cantus dulcedine capti illuc divertentes naufragium incurrent. Veruntamen scitote nullum unquam maria transiturum, nisi hoc idem et ipse fecerit. // Cera virgine ape procreata, Christum signat. Hic cordis nostri aures daudit, ne dum-per mundi huius procellas remigamus, carnalium volupratum dulcedine, velut Syrenarum melodia decepti interius periclitemur, alioquin neminem ad Deum enavigaturum constat."

(38.) "Cantor, 141 D: "Hi sunt 'Sirenes usque in exitium dulces.' De quibus Hieronymus: 'Ad patriam tendentes, debemus mortiferos Sirenarum cantus surda aure transire,' obturando aures sicut aspis, eas pice liniendo cum Ulysse et sociis eius." The expression "Sirenes usque in exitium dulces" comes from Boethius, 1.1.11.

Peter Cantor's contemporary John of Salisbury repeatedly alludes to Ulysses' encounter with the Sirens. In Entheticus in Policraticum, lines 233-34, John counsels his readers to shut their ears to all grandiloquence: "Dum linguas acuunt alii, tibi calleat auris, / et sit Dulichio remige surda magis" (While others sharpen their tongues, let your ear grow calloused and be more deaf than the Ithacan oarsman). And in Policraticus 7.20, he grumbles that anyone who refuses to heed the doctors of the Church, "cecior est Hipsea er Dulichio remige surdior" (is blinder than Hypsaea and deafer than the Ithacan oarsman). However, "remige" in these examples is probably just a collective singular for a bench of rowers; see, for example, Juvenal, 9.150. In Policraticus 6.28, John shows himself perfectly acquainted with the Homeric version: "[Ulixes] Sirenas audiit nec accessit" ([Ulysses] heard the Sirens but did not draw near).

(39.) Gunther of Pairis, 132 B-C: "Sicut ille [Ulysses] infusa pice tam suis quam sociorum auribus surdo, ut ita dicam, remigio illecebrosas Syrenum cantus effugit; ita nos ad omnia quae corrupto auditu nos in naufragium morum trahere possunt, aures oppilare ac velut obsurdescere debemus, dicentes cum Psalmista: 'Ego autem tanquam surdus non audiebam'." The reference is to Psalms 38 (37).14.

(40.) [Vincent of Beauvais], 878 E-879 A: "Dicitur de Ulysse, quod cum iret per mare per loca ubi consueverant audiri cantus Syrenarum . . . ille sapiens dicitur obturasse aures suas pice, ne attractus cantus earum dulcedine praecipitaret se in mare."

(41.) Petrarch, 1965, 1.62: "haec volupras oculorum multo aurium taedio pensanda est, quibus contra ilium tartareae vocis horrorem vel fugae vel Ulysseae picis auxilio opus sit." The translation comes from Rawski, 1:181, where, however, "Ulysseae picis" is rendered as 'the wax of Ulysses."

(42.) Petrarch, 1933-1942, 23.2.32: "obserande aures Ulixeum in morem, ut in portum glorie Sirenum inter scopulos evadamus."

(43.) Petrarch, 1965, 2.97: "Iam quod ars Ulyxi praestitisse fertur, tibi vel natura praestitit vel casus aliquis, ut si Syrenum cantus surda tutus aure pertranseas, foelicem te si aestimas, quot inde pericula penetrare in animum potuissent, quotque olim inde mendacia, quot errores, quot demum molestiae subiere?" The translation comes from Rawski, 3:240.

(44.) See Eisenhut, 11-28.

(45.) See Benoit, lines 28858.68.

(46.) Guido, bk. 33: "In has igitur Syrenes incidi, et ne socii mci mecum involverentur ... soporis errore, meis arribus et mei et eorum auditum sic tenaciter obturavi quod de earum cantu ego er socii mei nichil penitus audientes ipsas debeilavimus, et plus quam mile ex eis interfecimus." Neither the Gest Hystoriale nor Caxton's Recuyell (which is based on the French of Raoul Lefevre) mentions Ulysses' stratagem of sealing everyone's ears, including his own. The motif is found in Lydgate, 5.2078-82: "But with be lif I eskaped by grace: I For myn erys with wex & gommys clere / Were stoppid so, pat I ne my3t[e] here / Touche nor werble of her instrumentis, / Wher-by pe resoun of [a] man y-blent is."

(47.) Gesta Romanorum, chap. 237, app. 41: "Tres Syrene sunt tres qui in mundo sunt ad peccatum incitantia sc. caro, mundus er dhyabolus. Tria carmina sunt delicie, divicie, honores .... Sed ab istis persuasionibus debes obturare aurem tuam .... Sed solus Ulixes pertransiit et evasit. Sic quilibet homo humilis qui designatur per Ulixem poterit evadere illas tres Syrenes." The chapter, first found in some late-fourteenth-century manuscripts, does not occur in the main editions of the Gesta Romanorum. For the idea that there are three Sirens, each making music in her own way, see Servius's commentary on Vergil, Aeneid 5.864; Isidore, 11.3.30.

(48.) Bromyarde, A 26 ("Audire"), par. 40: "Exemplum ad hoc dicitur in fabulis, quod Ulixes transiturus per locum in mari, ubi Syrena in cantatione sua omnes transeuntes decepit, obturavit aures suas et sic periculum evasit. Ita tu obtura aures tuas, et noli audire linguam nequam (Ecclesi. xxviii) [Sirach 28.28 (Vulg.)]." The book was printed at Cologne circa 1473, at Basel circa 1484, at Nuremberg in 1485, at Venice in 1586, and at Antwerp in 1614.

(49.) Bromyarde, C 17 ("Crux"), par. 20: "Sicut ergo Ulixes secundum fabulas transiturus per loca maritima ubi erat cantus Synenarum aure obturavit, ne cantus dulcedine delectaretur, et arbori navis se ligavit, ne ab eis quocunque modo deceptus ad mare raperetur, et sicut fugiens ad ecclesiam videns inimicos supervenire ad eum rapiendum crucifixum amplectitur: Ita quilibet nostrum per mare huius mundi navigaturus, aures et alios sensus claudat ab illicitis, ad Christum et crucem fugiat crucemque amplectatur." Owst, who points out the two exempla in Bromyarde, also mentions several other instances in medieval English sermons; see Owst, 186, with nn.2 and 4.

(50.) Bruni, a3v. For the influence of Basil's booklet in the Renaissance see Schucan.

(51.) See Silvio de' Piccolomini, 1967, 944 (where the name "Ulysses" is erroneously omitted): "Cum vero improborum hominum mentionem incidunt, fugienda est illorum imitatio auresque claudendae non secus atque ipsi ferunt [Ulyssem] ad Syrenarum cantus clausisse" (But when talk turns to wicked men, we must avoid imitating them and stop our ears, just as they say [Ulysses] did against the songs of the Sirens). In the very next sentence he mentions the translation by Bruni (also known after his birthplace as "Aretino"): "Magnus Basilius..., ut Aretinus transfert" (Basilius the Great ..., as Aretino translates).

(52.) Silvio de' Piccolomini, 1912, 123: "in omni turpiloquio est imitandus Ulixes, qui ceras aftixit auribus, ne Sirenarum cantus exaudiret."

(53.) Mancinus, 23v: "Difficile est blandis verbis occludier aures, / Egregium imprimis idque refertur opus. / Non puto Sirenas alias quas sprevit Ulyxes / Quam blandas linguas. Sunt ea monstra satis." In Barclay's translation the passage reads as follows: "When false adulation with fayre wordes doth glose, / And flatterers doth truth with paynted wordes pall, / It is difficultie [i.e., difficulte] thine eares then to close, / And counted a mastery and labour principall: / These arc the mermaydes whom men Syrens call....// These flatterers by whom the worlde is acloyde / I count the same monsters, whose gilefull armony / Vlisses despised, and namely [i.e., manly] did auoyde, / Him selfe to preseruing and all his company" (75). Turberville's version is more compact: "'Tis harde to stoppe the open eares / against the pleasant call, / And that was euer compted yet / the greatest praise of all. / No other Syrenes sure they were / that wise Vlysses guylde, / Than smooth & plesant speaking tongs / with falshodes cu nning fylde" (G7r).

(54.) Bartholomew of Cologne, 58: "Dulces blanditias sapiens ut toxica melle / Oblita devitat blandiloquosque fugit. / Auribus oppletis cera versutus Ulysses / Sirenum molles praeteriit modulos."

(55.) Brant, 1961, 36.29-33: "Wer hofft dem narren schiff entgan / Der muoB des wachs jnn oren han / Das brucht Vlisses vff dem mer / Do er sach der Syrenen her / Vnd er durch wiBheyt von jnn kam."

(56.) For Brant's emphasis on Ulysses' wisdom see in particular Narrenschiff, chap. 108, with a lengthy allegorization of the hero's wanderings. His intimate knowledge of Basil's Address is apparent from Narrenschiff, 34.27-30 and 107.17-36. See Vredeveld, 1997, 589-90 and 645-46. Brant's knowledge of Ulysses' encounter with the Sirens comes entirely from secondary sources, not from the Odyssey itself.

(57.) Brant, 1968, lines 2499-501: "Langen har mir wach[beta] ich will mein oren / Verstopffen das ich nit mog horen, / Ich will dissen weg der tugent gan."

(58.) Hutten 4:48: "ex aulicis quidam Ulyssem imitantur qui in turbulento hoc mari navigantes cera obthuratis auribus insidiosac Syrenum cantionis capaces non sunt.

(59.) Hessus, 1508, B3v: "Audistin Syrenes dulce cantantes blanda dulcedine soporatos et allectos ad se nautas in mari submersisse? Quarum ut asturiam devitemus sapientissimum Ulyssem imitemur, qui a Troia revertens cum in eas incidisset a Circe prius admonitus aures caera obstruxit et exiciali dulcedini viam preclusit seque ad puppim alligari foecit."

(60.) Hessus, 1512, [A5]r: "Syrenum non vox erat una, sed omnes. / Auditis quibus ipse ratem reflectat Ulysses."

(61.) Hessus, 1514, 65r: "Qui nisi sprevisset blandas audire querelas, / Subdisset miserae seque suosque neci." In the revised editions of 1532 and 1539 this text can be found at Heroides 3.6.177-78. See Vredeveld, 1990, 458.

(62.) ASD 5.1:42, 75-77: "Ulysses (Homero aurore), qui sapientis perfectique personam gent, Sirenum istarum voces multo studio (ut qui cera aures oppleverit seque malo rudente astrinerit) vix effugit. Tibi porno quid spei est?"; mans. Rummel, CWE 66:137.

(63.) ASD 4.1:63, 180-81: "Ad harum Syrenum exitiales cantilenas tu, clarissime dux, cum Homerico Ulysse aures habes undique cera obturatas?"; trans. Radice, CWE 27:43.

(64.) See Adagia, no. 3207, ASD 2.7:144, 85-86: "Natum ab Ulyssis cera, qua suas ac sociorum aures obturat apud Homenum adversus Sirenarum cantilenas." For Shakespeare's use of Erasmus's Adagia see Baldwin, 2:342-49.

(65.) ASD 1.5:170, 154-56: "Quemadmodum Ulysses auribus caera obturatis Sirenum periculum praeternavigavit, ita nos si quid incidit blande foedum in authoribus praetervehi oportebit"; trans. Mynors, CWE 23:181. The Parabolae were a great success in Elizabethan England. See Wesrney, 27-44, and the introduction by Margolin, ASD 1.5:54-75. For Shakespeare's use of the book see Baldwin, 2:350-52. Meres translates the simile as follows: "As Vlysses by stopping his eares with wax escaped the danger of the Syrens: so, if in reading of authours, wee meere with any obscene or erronious matter, we are to passe it ouer with deafe eares and blindfolded eies. Plut[archus]" (267v). Cawdray offers this version: "As Vlisses stopping his eares with waxe, escaped the danger of the Sirenes: So ought we to auoyde such things as are found filthy in Bookes, and Authors, though they seeme pleasant, if we will auoide the danger ensuing such things" (51).

(66.) Moralia, 15 D; trans. Babbitt, 1:79.

(67.) ASD 1.3:180, 1800-01: "quemadmodum Ulysses obturatis auribus Sirenas praeter-navigavit" trans. Thompson, CWE39:98.

(68.) Apophthegmata 3, Socrates, 98 (col. 165 B): "Allusit ad Ulyssem, qui cera obturatis auribus praeternavigavit Sirenas." According to Westney, 24-25, the Apophthegmata, in the arrangement by Lycosthenes and often bound together with the Parabolae, were a standard schoolbook in both England and on the continent after 1574. For the topos cf. also Erasmus, Epistolae 2879, lines 148-150 (19 November 1533), referring to the dangers of living at the court of princes: "Adversus has Sirenes non locus nos tutos reddit, sed pro auribus animus diligenter obturatus, non cera quemadmodum fecit Ulysses Homericus, sed philosophiae praeceptis" (Against these Sirens there is no place that makes us safe; instead of our ears we must diligently seal our mind, not with wax of the sort that Homer's Ulysses prepared, but with the precepts of philosophy).

(69.) Rachwiltz, 158.

(70.) Cobb, 22: "If you design to make your Prince appear / As perfect, as Humanity can bear; / Whom Vertues at th' expence of danger please, / Deaf to the Syrens of alluring ease. / No Terrours Thee, Achilles, could invade, / Nor Thee, Ulysses, any charms persuade." Cobb's "Syrens of alluring ease" are a throwback to Horace's "wanton Siren Idleness." See Satires 2.3.14-15: "improba Siren / desidia."

(71.) Chudleigh, 112-13.

(72.) Picinelli, 3.58, nos. 160, 161, 163, and 167: "Mundi blanditiis aures nunquam esse commodandas, sed semper obturandas, ab Ulysse discas velim; qui in navigio Sirenibus vicinus, epigraphen tenet: OBSERATIS AURIBUS. ... // Ulysses Sirenibus intra navim vicinus epigraphen refert: SURDITATE SECURUS. Neque enim adversus effrontes meretricis assultus securius triumphabis, quam si allicientis invitamentis aures, venustati vero oculos preecludas. Proinde poeta: 'Auribus obstructis Syrenas fugit Ulysses. / Si fugis hanc, aures obstruito arque oculos.' ...// Patres Societatis Jesu in Belgio Ulyssem symboli loco statuerunt, qui, ad navigii malum religatus, aures admotis manibus obsepiebat; frustra circa navim ludente Sirenum choro. Lemma: CANITIS SURDIS CANITISQUE LIGATIS .... // Provide aures suas cera obturavit Ulysses; nam Sirenum cantus adeo blandus erar praeternavigantibus, ut in profundissimum somnum traherentur sopitique ye1 cum navibus in scopulos alliderentur vel in mare detracti necarentur, tanto numero ut littora passim naufragorum ossibus scaterent. Lemma e Claudiano subjunges: MORTEM DABIT IPSA VOLUPTAS." For the latter quotation see Claudian, 410, appendix 1, 9 (where "mortem dabat ipsa voluptas").

The Siren emblem also appears in the later editions of Alciati's Emblemata; see Alciati, 126. Though Alciati does nor specifically mention that Ulysses stopped his own ears, he does say: "Ulysses mocks [the Sirens]. Evidently, the wise will have nothing to do with a whore" ("[Sirenes] illudit Ulysses. I Scilicet est doctis cum meretrice nihil"). The woodcut shows Ulysses tied ro the mast, stolidly turned away from the Sirens.

(73.) Laurentius, 1688, Alv: "... da[beta] auch Ulysses, welcher die Gefahr deren Meerinnen zumeiden gelehrt / hette mussen Gehor geben."

(74.) Laurentius, 1682, 25 and 124.

(75.) Gueullette, 101; reference from Hepp, 62.

(76.) Dusaulx, 88-89.

(77.) Kafka, 40.

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