The terrors of the midday sleep were well known to the Greeks in their sun-smitten land; nightmare to them was also daymare. Such a visitation, coupled possibly with occasional cases of sunstroke, was of course the obsession of a demon[522]. Even a troubled tormenting illicit dream was the work of a Siren. In sleep the will and the reason are becalmed and the passions unchained. That the midday nightmare went to the making of the Siren is clear from the windless calm and the heat of the sun in Homer. The horrid end, the wasting death, the sterile enchantment, the loss of wife and babes, all look the same way. Homer, with perhaps some blend of the Northern mermaid in his mind, sets his Sirens by the sea, thereby cleansing their uncleanness; but later tradition kept certain horrid primitive elements when it made of the Siren a hetaira disallowing the lawful gifts of Aphrodite. There remains another aspect of the Sirens. They appear frequently as monuments, sometimes as actual mourners, on tombs. Here all the erotic element has disappeared; they are substantially Death-Keres, Harpies, though to begin with they imaged the soul itself. The bird-woman of the Harpy tomb, the gentle angel of death, has been already noted (p. 177). The Siren on a black-figured lekythos in the British Museum[523] (fig. 40) is purely monumental. She stands on the grave stele playing her great lyre, while two bearded men with their dogs seem to listen intent. She is grave and beautiful with no touch of seduction. Probably at first the Siren was placed on tombs as a sort of charm, a προβασκάνιον, a soul to keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with apotropaic ritual (p. 196), that the charm itself is used as counter-charm. So the dreaded Death-Ker is set itself to guard the tomb. Other associations would gather round. The Siren was a singer, she would chant the funeral dirge; this dirge might be the praises of the dead. The epitaph that Erinna[524] wrote for her girl-friend Baukis begins ‘Pillars and Sirens mine and mournful urn.’ [Illustration: FIG. 40.] On later funeral monuments Sirens appear for the most part as mourners, tearing their hair and lamenting. Their apotropaic function was wholly forgotten. Where an apotropaic monster is wanted we find an owl or a sphinx.