ABSTRACT
“What song did the sirens sing?” asked Sir Thomas Browne, “Under what name did Achilles hide among the women?” One need not be a XVIIth century philosopher to worry about such apparently futile questions. Today, the meticulous zoologist seeking traces of tentacled monsters in the writings of antiquity is quickly brought to an equally peculiar question, for example:
“To which zoological species belonged the monster Skylla which Ulysses had to face on his return journey?”
