Sirens Trivia
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95 free Sirens trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This sirens trivia quiz is about the singing creatures of Greek mythology who lured sailors onto the rocks, and about everything that has borrowed their name since. Easy questions cover the story everyone half-remembers: how Odysseus survived their song, what his crew stuffed in their ears, who told him the trick, and how Orpheus got the Argonauts past. From there it digs into what the Greeks actually thought sirens looked like (birds, not fish), who their parents were, how the Muses humiliated them, and why some versions say the sirens died the day Odysseus sailed by. The harder end is for mythology buffs and classicists: Parthenope and the founding of Naples, the Li Galli islands, Butes and Aphrodite, Isidore of Seville's prostitutes, the medieval bestiaries that turned sirens into mermaids with combs and mirrors, Dante's dream, Kafka's silent sirens, the Ulysses pact and Etty, Waterhouse and Draper's paintings. A final stretch covers the siren's afterlife in the sea cows, the warning device, the Starbucks logo, Debussy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and television. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the sirens, the Odyssey and the works they inspired before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Greek mythology, Odyssey and mermaids quizzes next.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01DC Comics' Gotham City Sirens teams Catwoman and Poison Ivy with which third antiheroine?
Harley Quinn
Harley Quinn joined Catwoman and Poison Ivy in Paul Dini's 2009 series, which put her back in a leading role after years of scarce appearances and ran for 26 issues.
Q 02What did Odysseus' crew plug their ears with to avoid hearing the sirens?
Beeswax
Odysseus softened a cake of beeswax in the sun and pressed it into each crewman's ears; he alone listened, his own ears left unplugged.
Q 03How did Odysseus hear the sirens' song without being lured to his death?
Tied to the mast
Tied to the mast on his own orders, Odysseus signalled to be freed once the song reached him; Perimedes and Eurylochus bound him tighter instead.
Q 04Which sorceress advised Odysseus on how to survive the sirens?
Circe
Circe, who had earlier turned his men into swine on Aeaea, warned Odysseus about the sirens before he sailed and told him how to pass them safely.
Q 05Which explorer's ship journal describes three 'sirens' as 'not half as beautiful as they are painted'?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus logged the three 'sirenas' near Hispaniola in January 1493, on his first voyage home, adding that their faces had something masculine about them.
Q 06Which Edgar Allan Poe tale shares its title with a siren?
Ligeia
Ligeia, 'clear-toned', is one of three sirens the poet Lycophron names, beside Parthenope and Leucosia; Homer's Greek implies only two and names neither.
Q 07Which musician saved the Argonauts from the sirens by out-playing them on his lyre?
Orpheus
Orpheus raised his lyre and struck up a fast, lively tune that drowned out the sirens' voices until the wind carried the Argo clear; one crewman leapt overboard all the same.
Q 08Which goddess saved the Argonaut Butes from the sirens and, in some tellings, bore him a son?
Aphrodite
Aphrodite pitied Butes as he swam for the sirens' shore, snatched him from the surf and settled him at Lilybaeum in Sicily; the historian Diodorus makes Eryx their son.
Q 09The sirens are most often named as daughters of which river god?
Achelous
Achelous, the river god who lost a horn wrestling Heracles for a bride, is the sirens' usual father; their mother is variously Terpsichore, Melpomene, Calliope or Sterope of Calydon.
Q 10Per Ovid, the sirens were companions of which goddess, and gained wings to search for her when she was abducted?
Persephone
Persephone's playmates were the sirens, in Ovid: after Hades seized her they prayed for wings to search the seas, and kept their girls' faces and voices so that their song would survive.
Q 11The sirens lost a singing contest to which group of goddesses?
The Muses
The Muses won, plucked out the sirens' feathers and wore them as crowns, Pausanias says; it was Hera who had talked the sirens into the challenge.
Q 12According to later ancient authors, what did the sirens do once Odysseus had sailed safely past?
Drowned themselves
They drowned themselves: Hyginus says the sirens were fated to live only until someone heard their song and sailed on, so when Odysseus escaped they threw themselves into the sea.
Q 13Legend says the siren Parthenope washed ashore on the islet under which Naples castle?
Castel dell'Ovo
Q 21Medieval bestiaries gave the siren which two accessories, now emblematic of mermaids across Europe?
A comb and a mirror
A comb and a mirror marked the siren as a vain creature in the bestiaries; the pair then passed to the mermaid, who still holds them in art and folklore.
Q 22Isidore of Seville, in his Etymologiae, rationalised the sirens as what?
Prostitutes who ruined travellers
Isidore wrote that sirens were really prostitutes who ruined travellers, leading them into poverty; their wings and claws were invented, he said, because Love both flies and wounds.
Q 23In Isaiah 13:22, Jerome used the Latin for sirens to translate a Hebrew word meaning what?
Castel dell'Ovo stands on Megaride, once an islet and now joined to the shore; settlers from Cumae are said to have named their first town there Parthenope after her.
Q 14In a later Parthenope legend, which volcano did Jupiter turn a lovesick centaur into?
Vesuvius
In Neapolitan legend the centaur Vesuvio fell in love with the siren Parthenope; Jupiter turned him into Mount Vesuvius, whose eruptions are said to be his frustrated rage.
Q 15Which Roman poet wrote that 'sweet Parthenope', meaning Naples, nurtured him as he wrote?
Virgil
Virgil ends the Georgics saying 'sweet Parthenope' nurtured him; when he died his remains were carried to Naples, where his epitaph says 'now Parthenope holds me'.
Q 16The Sirenusas, islands off the Amalfi Coast said to be the sirens' home, are also known by what name?
Li Galli
Li Galli, 'the cocks', recalls the bird-bodied sirens of Greek art; the geographer Strabo already knew the rocky islets off this coast as the Sirens.
Q 17Which island did Hesiod and Apollonius of Rhodes name as the sirens' home?
Anthemoessa
Anthemoessa, 'the flowery one', is the sirens' island in Hesiod's Catalogue of Women and in Apollonius's Argonautica; later writers placed the sirens off the Campanian coast near Capri.
Q 18Terra Sirenum, Latin for 'land of the sirens', is a cratered upland on which world?
Mars
Mars keeps the sirens' name on its southern highlands: Terra Sirenum is scarred by huge craters such as Newton, yet one low basin there is thought to have once held a lake.
Q 19Greek artists may have modelled the siren on the ba, a human-headed bird of which ancient religion?
Egyptian
Egyptian belief pictured the ba, a person's soul, as a human-headed bird that left the body at death; the male sirens of this eastern type had vanished from Greek art by the fifth century BC.
Q 20Which early medieval work, written around 700, describes sirens as sea-girls with scaly fishes' tails?
Liber Monstrorum
The Liber Monstrorum, an Anglo-Latin catalogue of marvels, gives sirens a maiden's body and scaly fishes' tails, more than a thousand years after Greek artists first drew them as birds.
Jackals
Jerome's Vulgate renders the Hebrew tannim, jackals, as 'sirenae' in Isaiah 13:22, picturing them howling among the ruined palaces of Babylon.
Q 24In which of Dante's works does he dream of a siren who claims to have diverted Ulysses?
Purgatorio
In Purgatorio XIX Dante dreams of a stammering woman who becomes a 'sweet siren' and boasts of turning Ulysses from his course, a boast Homer's account never supports.
Q 25Which Renaissance figure wrote that the siren sings mariners to sleep, then climbs aboard and kills them?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci's notebook bestiary files the siren under flatterers: she sings so sweetly that the mariners fall asleep, then climbs onto the ship and kills them.
Q 26Which 17th-century Jesuit scholar argued Noah must have built compartments for sirens on the Ark?
Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher, in his 1675 Arca Noë, reasoned that since sirens were real creatures, Noah must have built compartments to house them aboard the Ark.
Q 27In Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia, which legendary founder of Britain nearly capsizes at the Pillars of Hercules?
Brutus of Troy
Brutus of Troy, great-grandson of Aeneas, meets the sirens beyond the Pillars of Hercules in Geoffrey's Historia; his ships barely escape into the Tyrrhenian Sea, where he finds Corineus.
Q 28Which Roman author dismissed sirens as fable while noting a claim that they lived in India?
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder gave sirens no credit in his Natural History, yet passed on Dinon's report that in India they charm men with song, lull them to sleep and tear them to pieces.
Q 29Which Rhine rock is home to a siren of German legend whose song lures boatmen to their deaths?
The Lorelei
The Lorelei, a steep slate cliff in the Rhine Gorge, gained its enchantress only in 1801, in a ballad by Clemens Brentano; Heinrich Heine's 1824 poem made her famous.
Q 30Which of these siren-titled works is a short story by Franz Kafka?
The Silence of the Sirens
Kafka's parable The Silence of the Sirens, unpublished until 1931, holds that the sirens had a weapon deadlier than their song, their silence, and that Ulysses sailed past without noticing it.