Charybdis

The two cliffs

In the Odyssey, the early Greek poem about Odysseus and his journey home from Troy, the poet Homer sets two cliffs close together, near enough that a man could shoot an arrow from one to the other. The taller one is smooth and unclimbable, with a dim cave partway up where the monster Scylla lives. The lower one carries a great fig tree in heavy leaf, and beneath the tree the sea goes down. Three times a day she belches the water out, and three times she sucks it in. When the crew finally see her for themselves, Homer writes the water and nothing else: it seethes up like a cauldron on a great fire, and when it drains away the black sand of the bottom shows. The only shape in the whole episode is a human one, a man hanging in the branches waiting for his own wreckage.

The choice Circe sets

The sailing directions come from the goddess Circe, who holds the route home and gives it to Odysseus danger by danger. Do not be there when Charybdis sucks the water down, she tells him, because nobody could save him from it, not even Poseidon, the god of the sea. Draw close to Scylla’s cliff instead and drive the ship past quickly, because it is better to mourn six comrades than the whole company. Odysseus asks the obvious question in return: how he might get clear of Charybdis and still beat off the other creature when she starts on his men. Circe gives him no answer he can use. Scylla is no mortal thing but an immortal bane, and the only counsel is speed. The choice she leaves him is between a loss of six men, known in advance, and the chance of losing everyone.

Six men lost while the crew watch

They take her advice and lose the six anyway. The ship comes through on Scylla’s side, and as it passes the crew watch Charybdis at work: the salt water sucked down, the cauldron boil, the black sand showing at the bottom. While their eyes are on the whirlpool, Scylla reaches into the hollow ship and takes six men, the best of the crew in strength and in might. Circe’s count is paid out exactly as she gave it, on the side of the strait she recommended, and it is paid because the danger across the water had everybody’s attention. The whirlpool itself kills nobody on that crossing.

The second passing, and the fig tree

Odysseus meets her again at the end of the book, and this time he is alone. His ship is gone and his crew are dead, and he is adrift on the mast and keel when the wind turns and carries him back along the way he came. He reaches the cliff at sunrise, with Charybdis sucking the sea down beneath the tree. He springs for the fig tree, lays hold of it and clings on like a bat. He cannot plant his feet or climb: the roots spread far below him and the branches hang out of reach above, long and great, overshadowing the whirlpool. So he hangs there and waits for her to throw the mast and the keel back up. Homer times the wait by the hour at which a man who has spent the day deciding the quarrels of younger men rises from the assembly for his supper. The spars come up at last. Odysseus lets go hands and feet, drops past them into the water, sits on them and rows away with his hands.

One sentence in the handbooks

The later writers who gathered the myths into handbooks had almost nothing to gather. Apollodorus, whose summary runs through the whole of the Odyssey in a few pages, gives her a single sentence of mechanism: “in the other cliff was Charybdis, who thrice a day drew up the water and spouted it again”. In that summary the episode has also become a decision at a fork, with the Wandering Rocks on one route and the two cliffs on the other, and Circe’s advice is what settles which way the ship goes. Scylla acquires a parentage in the compilers. Charybdis does not. A late genealogy, given by a commentator on the Roman poet Virgil, makes her a daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, the earth, a greedy woman punished by Zeus, the king of the gods.

The Argo goes through

Charybdis stands in one other voyage. In the Argonautica, the poem on the voyage of the ship Argo, the goddess Hera fears the crew will fall into Charybdis helpless and be swallowed at one gulp, so she has the ship handed through by divinities. The sea goddess Thetis takes the rudder herself, with her sisters the Nereids ranged along the route, and the Argo goes between the smooth rock on one side and Charybdis spouting and roaring ceaselessly on the other. It is the same pair in the same arrangement, and the ship survives it only because a goddess is steering.

Where the ancients put her

Homer gives no coordinates, and the placing came afterwards. Thucydides, the Athenian historian of the war between Athens and Sparta, writing in the fifth century BC, puts her in real water: the strait between Italy and Sicily, from Rhegium on the Italian side to Messana on the Sicilian, which he calls the Charybdis of the story. Centuries later Strabo, who wrote a geography of the known world, reports her as a sight shown to travellers a short distance from Messana, an immense gulf in the strait whose back currents drag ships down, with the wreckage coming ashore at Tauromenium, now Taormina, on the Sicilian coast. Strabo also explains where the poet found her. The idea of Charybdis, he argues, was taken from the ebb and flow of the tide in that strait, and Circe exaggerated it: the tide turns twice in a day rather than three times, and the long wait at the fig tree fits two turns better than three. Nineteenth-century geography followed him rather than Homer, and fixed the whirlpool just outside the harbour of Messana, now Messina.