Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

On the return from Colchis the Argo passed the Sirens—the same deadly singers Odysseus would later hear. Orpheus raised his lyre and drowned their song with a faster, louder melody so that the crew pulled past. Butes son of Teleon alone, overwhelmed, leapt from the ship into the sea and swam toward the strand. Aphrodite snatched him from the surge, pitied him, and set him ashore at Lilybaeum in Sicily (Drepanum’s coast), where she lay with him and he became ancestor of local lines in Sicilian lore. The episode contrasts Argonautic and Homeric Siren-strategies: collective music versus individual binding and wax. Catalogue Butes’s leap as the cost of one unshielded listener and as Aphrodite’s western rescue, distinct from Odysseus’s mast-bound ordeal.