Scylla

The warning before the strait

Scylla belongs to the Odyssey, the ancient Greek poem by Homer about Odysseus and his long voyage home from the war at Troy. She is described long before she is seen. Circe, the goddess whose island the ship has just left, tells Odysseus what lies on the route ahead. Two cliffs stand across it. The taller rises into a dark cloud that never clears, and no man could climb it, because the rock is smooth as if it had been polished. Partway up there is a dim cave facing west, and Scylla lives inside it.

Circe gives the body as a count. Scylla has 12 feet, all of them misshapen, and six necks of great length, with an appalling head on each and three rows of thick teeth in every head. Her voice is the yelp of a new-born puppy. Yet she is an evil thing to look at, Circe says, and not even a god would be glad to meet her. She keeps her lower half inside the cave and holds the heads out over the water, fishing the rock for dolphins, seals and any larger creature she can take.

No defence but speed

Opposite the cave is a lower cliff with a great fig tree on it, and beneath the tree Charybdis, the whirlpool, swallows the black water and belches it out again three times a day. Circe does not offer the two as an even choice. Draw close to Scylla’s cliff, she says, and drive the ship past quickly, because mourning six of the crew is better than losing all of them together.

Odysseus asks whether he can fight Scylla off instead. Circe refuses him. Scylla is immortal, she answers, a dread and fierce thing that cannot be fought, and against her the bravest course is flight. If he stops to arm himself by the cliff she will dart out a second time and take six more men. He is told to row with all his might and to call on Crataiis, Scylla’s mother, who bore her as a plague to mortals. That name is the only parent Homer gives her.

What the passage cost

The ship goes up the narrow water with the crew already wailing. On one side Charybdis sucks the sea down and throws it up again, seething and bubbling like a cauldron on a great fire, and the spray falls on the tops of both cliffs. Everyone is watching her. While they watch, Scylla reaches into the ship and takes six men, the best of the crew in strength. Odysseus turns and sees their feet and hands lifted above him. They call him by name, each of them for the last time.

Homer then compares her to a fisherman on a jutting rock, who lets his bait down on a long pole, hooks a small fish and flings it writhing ashore. The men are drawn up the cliff the same way. She eats them at her doors while they stretch their hands out towards him. Of everything he endured on the sea, Odysseus says, that was the most pitiful thing his eyes ever saw.

Whose daughter she was

The ancient accounts do not agree on where Scylla came from. Homer names her mother and stops there. Apollodorus, who compiled the Greek myths into a handbook, calls her a daughter of Crataeis and of Trienus or Phorcus, offering two fathers and settling on neither. He also divides the body differently: a woman’s face and breast above, and from the flanks downward six dog heads and 12 dog feet.

Apollonius Rhodius, who wrote the poem on the voyage of the Argo, gives a third version. In his poem Scylla is the child of Phorcys by Hecate, a goddess who roams at night, and he says that Hecate is the one they call Crataeis.

The girl in Ovid

The Latin poet Ovid makes Scylla a girl before she is a monster. Glaucus, a god of the sea, loves her and is refused. He asks Circe for a charm that will make Scylla share his passion. Circe wants him for herself, and when he will not have her she turns on the girl instead.

Circe crushes herbs notorious for their juices, mixes them with charms, walks dry-shod across the tossing water to the inlet where Scylla used to shelter from the heat of sea and sky. There she poisons the pool. Scylla comes down and wades in waist deep, then sees her loins fouled with barking shapes. She tries to drive the dogs back and finds that what she flees she carries with her. At the end of the story she is changed into a rock, and it is the rock, Ovid says, that sailors in his own day feared.

Where the strait was put

Homer never says where the cliff is. By the fifth century BC the passage had been fixed to real water. Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, says that the strait between Rhegium and Messana, where Sicily comes nearest the mainland, is the one called Charybdis and that Odysseus is said to have passed through it. Ovid puts Scylla on the same coast, on the Italian shore opposite the Messenian walls.

A headland in Greece carries the name, and it belongs to a different woman. Pausanias, who travelled the country and wrote down what he saw, says that the headland called Scyllaeum, in the Argolid, the region of the eastern Peloponnese around Argos, is named after the daughter of Nisus. Through her treachery Minos, the Cretan king, took Nisaea and Megara. He then refused to marry her and ordered his Cretans to throw her from the ship, and the waves cast her body up on that headland.

The Scylla the Greek craftsmen made

Greek art did not draw the creature Homer described. In its hands she becomes a sea demon with a human body: a woman to the waist, dog heads springing from her hips and a fish tail below. In the earliest images she is clothed, and from the late fifth century BC onwards she is shown nude. Later she appears hurling a rock or pulling Odysseus’ comrades out of the ship.

Two of these bronzes are in Athens. The figurine found at Kataphylli in Karditsa, in the area of Argithea, dates to the late fourth century BC and stands in Room 36, Showcase 11 of the Bronze Metalwork Collection at the National Archaeological Museum. She is caught mid-throw, a stone raised in her right hand. Her hair is carefully combed and she wears a short himation, a light cloak. A small disc is cast under the curved tail, which means the figure was once fixed to a vase or an incense burner. The second bronze is on a decorative plaque, and she is calm there, holding an oar or a rudder.