Circe: The Witch the Odyssey Was Afraid Of

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When Odysseus's men arrive on Aeaea, they find a woman singing inside a house surrounded by wolves and lions who are somehow tame — not threatening but domestic, the way you might find a cat on a windowsill. This detail, which Homer gives in three lines and then drops, is doing a great deal of work. The animals are men she has transformed, specifically men from previous ships, and the fact that they are tame is not reassurance but the opposite: they have been made docile by someone whose competence with transformation is so complete that she does not need to maintain effort. Circe's island is already organized the way she wants it. The men she encounters are an interruption she deals with efficiently.

Eurylochus, the most cautious of Odysseus's crew, refuses to enter the house and watches through a window while the others accept Circe's hospitality — food, wine, a drug in the food — and are turned into pigs. He runs back to tell Odysseus. Odysseus sets out alone to rescue them, meets Hermes on the road, who gives him the herb moly as protection against the transformation drug, arrives at Circe's house, drinks the drugged wine, does not transform, draws his sword, and — at this point the poem does something quite specific — Circe falls immediately to her knees and asks who he is, because no man has ever resisted her drug before. This is presented as a victory. It is also, if you read it carefully, a rather quick capitulation from someone who has spent the last few paragraphs demonstrating formidable independent capability.

What Circe Actually Is

Circe is the daughter of Helios, the sun, and Perse, a daughter of Ocean. She is therefore divine by parentage on both sides, which in the Greek mythological taxonomy makes her a goddess or something very close to it — the distinction between nymph, goddess, and sorceress is not consistently maintained in the ancient sources, and Circe occupies all three categories depending on which text you read. She appears in Apollonius of Rhodes's Argonautica as well as the Odyssey — the Argonauts stop at Aeaea and Circe purifies Jason and Medea of the blood-guilt from Absyrtus's murder, which tells you something about her standing: she is the appropriate person to perform this ritual, which means her authority is recognized by the gods, which means her power is not transgressive but legitimate. This is considerably more impressive than being a witch. It also makes the Odyssey's framing of her as simply dangerous considerably harder to sustain, if you are paying attention.

This matters because the Odyssey frames her as a danger — she turns men into pigs, she delays Odysseus a full year, she is one of the poem's many female threats to the hero's homecoming. But the danger is specifically the danger of a woman with power who uses it. The wolves and lions that greet the Greeks were men she transformed, and the question of why she transformed them is never asked by the poem. It is assumed, because she is a witch and witches transform men, because that is what they do. The men she transformed are simply examples of what can happen. The island is her domain, her rules apply, and the poem treats this as an obstacle rather than as a sovereignty claim worth taking seriously.

A Year on Aeaea

Odysseus stays a year. This is a significant amount of time in an epic structured around urgency — the Greeks won the war, they need to go home, every delay is another season of Penelope's suitors eating through her stores. And yet Odysseus stays a year, and the poem does not condemn him for it with the same vigor it condemns other delays. The year on Aeaea is productive: Circe gives Odysseus practical information about his route, tells him he must descend to the underworld to consult Tiresias, describes the obstacles he will face — the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the sun. She is his intelligence source as well as his host. When he finally announces they must leave, she agrees without complaint. She provides for the voyage. She says goodbye.

Homer's Circe is more interesting than the poem's framing of her, which is the situation with most of the powerful women in the Odyssey. Calypso holds Odysseus seven years on her island and is ordered by Zeus to release him; she obeys, and before he leaves she tells him, with some bitterness, that gods are not permitted to love mortals long-term, that the rules apply differently depending on gender, that she has done nothing wrong but will be blamed for everything. This speech has no response. Odysseus sails away. Circe is less explicit but the architecture of her situation is similar: she lives alone, she has resources and capabilities, she has organized her world to her own satisfaction, and the story requires her to yield this to the hero's passage so that the hero can reach home. She does. The story continues. What the island is like after he leaves is not recorded, because the poem is about Odysseus and not about Aeaea, and Circe's continuing existence — if the myth considers it at all — is not the point. The myth is in a hurry. Ithaca is waiting.

Working with the Argonaut tradition, which includes the Aeaea episode as a different kind of stop — Jason and Medea arriving guilt-ridden and needing ritual cleansing rather than Odysseus arriving intent on rescue — I find Circe the most competent supporting character in the mythology. She is neither victim nor villain. She is an authority in her domain who has developed her capabilities over what appears to be a very long time, who deals with strangers according to her own logic, and who is remembered primarily for the pig transformation because that is the most narratively striking thing she does. The year's hospitality, the ritual purification, the intelligence briefing, the gracious departure — these are less memorable than the pigs. The myth keeps what it needs and lets the rest go.