In Greco-Roman mythology, there exists two great terrors of the sea: Scylla, a six-headed sea monster, and a vicious swirl of water, Charybdis, that gulps down the sea and any wayward passengers upon it. They appear in The Odyssey, when Odysseus must navigate home, traveling between the straits of Messina.
Scylla: From Maiden to Monster
Scylla did not begin as a monster. She was at one time a beautiful maiden. Like many beautiful maidens, Scylla had many suitors, all of whom she spurned. After being rejected by Scylla, Glaucus, a sea-god, went to Circe for a love-potion. Circe fell in love with Glaucus, but he rejected her. In her jealousy, Circe enchanted the pool in which Scylla bathed regularly. The very next time Scylla entered the pool, her lower extremities were transformed into six beasts, whose heads were the threat to Odysseus and his crew.
This is the story that appears in Books Thirteen and Fourteen of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid writes, “no sooner has she plunged / waist-deep into the water than she sees, / around her hips, the horrid barking shapes” (Ovid 475). He goes on, writing “At first, not able to believe that these / are part of her own body, Scylla flees; / afraid, she tires to chase off these loud dogs. / But what she flees, she carries with her self; / and as she probes her thighs, her shins, her feet, / she finds just gaping dogs in place of these” (475). Finally Ovid says that Scylla stayed in place and took revenge on Circe by attacking Odysseus’s (known in Roman myth as Ulysses) ship.
Charybdis: The Swirling Abyss
Homer describes the horror of Charybdis in The Odyssey. Odysseus says, “her horrible whirlpool gulping the sea-surge down, down / but when she spewed it up—like a cauldron over a raging fire— / all her churning depths would seethe and heave—exploding spray / showering down to splatter the peaks of both crags at once!” (Homer 12.255-8). Odysseus was warned by Circe to avoid passing by Charybdis, telling him that Scylla, while still deadly to Odysseus’s men, was not as deadly since Scylla could only kill six men at a time.
Zeus destroys Odysseus’s ship, however, as punishment for eating the Cattle of the Sun. Odysseus, on a raft, is blown back towards the double threat. It is at this point that Odysseus is sucked into the whirlpool, and would have drowned except for “heaving [himself] aloft to clutch at the fig-tree’s height, / like a bat [he] clung to its trunk for dear life” (12.466-7). When Charybdis evacuated the remains of Odysseus’s raft, he was able to make his escape. Hence the phrase “between Scylla and Charybdis” refers to a situation in which two possible options yield treacherous outcomes.
Sources
- Homer, The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. Peguin: New York, 1996
- March, Jenny. Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Cassell: London, 2001.
- Ovid, The Metamorphoses. Trans Allen Mandelbaum. Harcourt: New York, 1993.
Joshua Benson - As a librarian and student of literature, I delight in the facilitation of knowledge to the eager reader.
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