Circe

• 1. Introduction

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  Circe, the enchantress of Greek mythology, is called by Homer "a dreadful goddess with lovely hair and human speech." The phrase captures the trouble with her. She is a witch, yet she is sometimes treated as a goddess and sometimes as a nymph. Storytellers never settled the question. What they agreed on was her knowledge of potions and herbs. With those and a wand or staff, she changed enemies, and anyone who offended her, into animals.

  That is the short version. The longer one raises stranger questions. Where did she come from, and where exactly did she live? Why did she poison one rival and spare another visitor? And once her victims wore animal bodies, did any of them truly want to be human again? Poets, philosophers, painters and composers kept asking, and each age gave her a new face.

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• 2. Daughter of the Sun

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  Helios, the sun god, was Circe's father in most accounts, and her mother was Perse, one of the three thousand Oceanid nymphs. The Orphic Argonautica names a different mother, Asterope. Her brothers were Aeëtes, keeper of the Golden Fleece and father of Medea, and Perses. Her sister was Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos and mother of the Minotaur.

  Dionysius of Miletus and Diodorus Siculus told it another way, making Circe and Medea daughters of Hecate by Aeëtes. Both writers wanted to strip the supernatural out of myth. Their Hecate is therefore a mortal woman who simply discovered drugs and their properties, with no real magic involved. Ancient audiences also confused Circe with Calypso, since both women were bound up with Odysseus and both shifted in behavior and personality.

  Apollonius of Rhodes gave every descendant of Helios flashing golden eyes that shot out rays of light. The author of the Argonautica Orphica added that Circe had hair like fiery rays. Ovid's The Cure for Love suggests that Perse may have taught her daughter the herbs and potions, since Perse seems to have had similar skills.

  Homer never says exactly where Aeaea lies. Apollonius, writing in the early 3rd century BC, places it south of Aethalia, now called Elba, within view of the Tyrrhenian shore. That shore is the western coast of Italy. In the Argonautica, Aeëtes recalls a ride in his father's chariot, "taking my sister Circe to the western land." A scholiast on Apollonius says this follows Hesiod's tradition of Circe arriving on the chariot of Helios. Valerius Flaccus tells it differently, saying winged dragons carried her away.

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• 3. Purifier and Poisoner

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  In Apollonius's Argonautica, Jason and his crew reach Circe's island with blood on their hands. They find her bathing in salt water, surrounded by animals that are not former lovers. The poem calls them "beasts, not resembling the beasts of the wild, nor yet like men in body, but with a medley of limbs." Circe welcomes Jason, Medea and the crew into her mansion. They say nothing, but show her the still bloody sword used to cut down Medea's brother Absyrtus. She understands at once that they need purification, and she slits the throat of a suckling pig and lets the blood drip on them.

  Medea then tells Circe the whole tale except the murder. Circe is not fooled and greatly disapproves. Out of pity for the girl, and because they are kin, she promises not to stand in their way. She still orders Jason and Medea off her island immediately.

  The sea-god Glaucus loved a maiden named Scylla, who rejected him however hard he tried. He asked Circe for a potion to make Scylla love him back. Circe fell for Glaucus herself and offered him marriage, but he refused. In a rage she found the spot where Scylla usually bathed and poisoned the water. When Scylla stepped in, dogs sprang from her thighs, and she became the monster known from the Odyssey.

  Picus, a king of Latium and son of Saturn, met a similar fate. He had married a nymph named Canens and was utterly devoted to her. While hunting boars one day, he came upon Circe gathering herbs in the woods. She fell in love at once. Picus declared he would stay forever faithful to Canens, and Circe, furious, turned him into a woodpecker. Canens eventually wasted away in mourning.

  Even the herb that later undid Circe's magic has a violent origin. During the war between the gods and the giants, the giant Picolous fled the battle and reached Aeaea. He tried to chase Circe away and was killed by Helios, her father and ally. From his blood grew a herb called moly, with a white flower. The white may honor the pale Sun who killed the giant, or Circe herself, who turned white with terror. Mortals cannot pluck the plant from the ground.

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• 4. A Year on Aeaea

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  Strangely docile lions and wolves prowl around Circe's palace on Aeaea, deep in a dense wood. Homer's Odyssey, an 8th-century BC sequel to the Iliad, introduces her as a beautiful goddess. She lures visitors in with lovely singing as she weaves at an enormous loom, then drugs them so that they change shape. One of her Homeric epithets is polypharmakos, meaning knowing many drugs or charms.

  Odysseus's crew arrive on the way home from the Trojan War. Circe offers them a feast of familiar food, a pottage of cheese and meal sweetened with honey and laced with wine. She has also mixed in a potion, and it turns them into swine. Only Eurylochus, who suspects treachery, stays outside. He escapes to warn Odysseus and the men waiting at the ship.

  Hermes, the messenger god sent by the goddess of wisdom Athena, intercepts Odysseus before he reaches the palace. He hands over moly as protection against Circe's magic. He also instructs Odysseus to draw his sword and act as if he will attack her. Circe will then invite him to bed. Hermes urges caution, because she could still "unman" him. Odysseus must first make her swear by the names of the gods that she will do him no further harm. Following this advice, Odysseus frees his men.

  After the whole party has stayed on the island for a year, Circe gives Odysseus a startling instruction. He must first visit the Underworld, which no mortal has done before, to learn how to appease the gods, reach home safely and recover his kingdom. She supplies the protections he needs and the means to communicate with the dead. On his return she offers advice about two possible routes home, warning that both carry great danger.

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• 5. Sons and Shrines

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  Near the end of Hesiod's Theogony, dated to about 700 BC, Circe bears Odysseus three sons. They are Agrius, who is otherwise unknown, Latinus, and Telegonus, who ruled the Tyrsenoi, meaning the Etruscans. The lost epic Telegony follows the last of them. Circe eventually told Telegonus who his absent father was. When he set out to find Odysseus, she gave him a poisoned spear.

  Telegonus landed on Ithaca while Odysseus was away in Thesprotia, fighting the Brygi. He began to ravage the island, and Odysseus came to defend his land. With his mother's weapon, Telegonus killed his father without knowing who he was. He carried the corpse back to Aeaea, together with Penelope and Odysseus's son by her, Telemachus. After burying Odysseus, Circe made the other three immortal. On the advice of Athena, Circe married Telemachus and Telegonus married Penelope.

  Lycophron's poem Alexandra, from the 3rd century BC, offers an alternative ending. In that version Circe uses magical herbs to bring Odysseus back to life. He gives Telemachus in marriage to Circe's daughter Cassiphone. Later Telemachus quarrels with his mother-in-law and kills her. Cassiphone then kills Telemachus to avenge her mother, and Odysseus dies of grief on hearing the news.

  Xenagoras, a historian of the 2nd century BC, claimed that Odysseus and Circe had three different sons, cited by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Rhomos, Anteias and Ardeias founded three cities named after themselves: Rome, Antium and Ardea. The 5th-century CE epic Dionysiaca by Nonnus adds a son named Phaunus, whose father is the sea god Poseidon. The gens Mamilia, described by Livy as one of the most distinguished families of Latium, claimed descent from Mamilia, a granddaughter of Odysseus and Circe through Telegonus. One notable member was Octavius Mamilius, who died in 498 BC. He was princeps of Tusculum and son-in-law of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last king of Rome.

  Strabo writes that a tomb-shrine of Circe, typical of hero-worship, was tended on one of the Pharmacussae islands off the coast of Attica. Roman poets tied her to the most ancient traditions of Latium and set her home on the promontory of Circeo. Mount Circeo, according to ancient legend, took its name from her. Strabo says she had a shrine in the small town there, where people kept a bowl they claimed belonged to Odysseus. On the promontory itself stand the ruins of a platform, attributed with great probability to a temple of Venus or Circe.

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• 6. Reasoning Beasts

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  Aeschylus wrote a play about Odysseus's encounter with Circe, and two comic dramatists of the 4th century BC, Ephippus of Athens and Anaxilas, wrote others. All three are lost. Vase paintings from the period suggest that Odysseus's half-transformed animal-men formed the chorus in place of the usual satyrs. A fragment of Anaxilas survives in which a character complains that he can no longer scratch his face now that he is a pig.

  In the 1st century BC, Parthenius of Nicaea added a new victim to the story in The Sorrows of Love. King Calchus the Daunian pestered Circe with amorous attention, so she invited him to a drugged dinner, turned him into a pig and shut him in her sties. His army came searching for him, and he was released only on condition that he never set foot on her island again. Virgil's Aeneid, meanwhile, has Aeneas skirt the Italian island and hear the cries of her victims, who now outnumber the pigs of earlier accounts: "The roars of lions that refuse the chain, / The grunts of bristled boars, and groans of bears, / And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors' ears."

  Plutarch, in his 1st-century Moralia, wrote the dialogue that set the pattern for centuries. In the Gryllus episode, Circe lets Odysseus interview a fellow Greek who has been turned into a pig. The pig insists his present existence is better than the human one. Their talk questions every human value and concludes that beasts are superior in wisdom and virtue.

  Giovan Battista Gelli took up the idea in La Circe in 1549, a series of ten dialogues between Ulysses and humans transformed into creatures ranging from an oyster to an elephant. Most argue against changing back, and only the last animal, a philosopher in its former life, wants to. Henry Iden translated the work into English in 1557. Edmund Spenser echoed Plutarch in The Faerie Queene in 1590, where a former hog named Grille protests being restored. Niccolò Machiavelli's unfinished poem L'asino d'oro, from 1516, ends with a pig that condemns human greed, cruelty and conceit.

  Giordano Bruno's Cantus Circaeus of 1582 used the transformed creatures for a different purpose. Circe explains what each animal stands for, saying for instance that "fireflies are the learned, wise, and illustrious amidst idiots, asses, and obscure men." The real aim of the work was the art of memory. French writers followed Gelli in the next century. Antoine Jacob's Les Bestes raisonnables of 1661 has an ass that was once a doctor, and in the end only a horse, formerly a courtesan, wants to return to her old state. La Fontaine's fable of 1690 has every animal refuse restoration. In Fuzelier and Legrand's comic opera of 1718, only the dolphin agrees to change back.

  Later satirists kept the pen sharp. Gasparo Gozzi's Dialoghi dell'isola di Circe, published between 1760 and 1764, makes a bat the philosopher and a satirical bear the only creature who wishes to change. Thomas Love Peacock's novel Gryll Grange, from 1861, stages a Christmas entertainment in which Spiritualist mediums raise Circe and Gryllus and try to convince him that modern times are superior. He rejects them as intellectually and materially regressive. Matthew Arnold's poem "The Strayed Reveller" of 1849 reads her potion differently, as a gateway to the poet's frenzy that a sleeping youth craves to have continued.

  Austin Dobson's "The Prayer of the Swine to Circe," from 1875, takes Homer most seriously. His swine keep their human minds while their heads, faces and limbs bristle into pig shape. The poem offers no relief until its final line reveals that Odysseus has arrived to free them.

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• 7. Temptress Reclaimed

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  Socrates, in classical times, blamed gluttony for overcoming the men's self-control. Andrea Alciato, the emblematist, blamed unchastity instead. In the second edition of his Emblemata in 1546, he turned Circe into the type of the prostitute, and his Emblem 76 is titled Cavendum a meretricibus. Geoffrey Whitney borrowed the illustration for his Choice of Emblemes in 1586 and retitled it Homines voluptatibus transformantur, meaning men are transformed by their passions. James Joyce's novel Ulysses carries this reading into its Nighttown section named after her. There Circe becomes the brothel madam Bella Cohen, and Bloom fantasizes that she turns into a cruel man-tamer named Mr Bello.

  By the 19th century, poets treated her as a type of woman rather than a myth. Albert Glatigny, in Les vignes folles in 1857, made her a voluptuous opium dream. Lord de Tabley's "Circe" of 1895 likens her to a tulip of decadent perversity. T. S. Eliot's student poem "Circe's Palace," printed in The Harvard Advocate in 1909, never shows her at all. Only her grounds appear, where panthers, pythons and peacocks "look at us with the eyes of men whom we knew long ago." Rather than a temptress, she has become an emasculatory threat.

  Renaissance poets had already multiplied her. Alcina in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso holds the Saracen champion Ruggiero captive on a magic island. Armida in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered is sent to sow discord among the Crusaders, changes some into animals, and then falls in love with the hero Rinaldo instead of killing him. Spenser's Acrasia holds knights enchanted in her Bower of Bliss. John Milton's Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, from 1634, reverses the myth. Its enchanter Comus, son of Circe by Bacchus, presses a magical cup on a heroine who repeatedly refuses it and argues for temperance and chastity. Later scholarship has even proposed that Shakespeare's Titania, whose title was one Circe bore in classical times, inverts her.

  The most striking turn came when women poets let Circe speak. Augusta Webster's dramatic monologue "Circe," in Portraits in 1870, has the sorceress deny that she turns men into pigs. "But any draught, pure water, natural wine, / out of my cup, revealed them to themselves / and to each other. Change? there was no change; / only disguise gone from them unawares." Leigh Gordon Giltner's "Circe" of 1900 portrays a woman conscious of her own sexual power. H.D.'s "Circe," from Hymen in 1921, reviews the conquests that bored her and mourns the one man she failed to win. Margaret Atwood's "Circe/Mud Poems" of 1974 barely mentions the myth beyond its title.

  Carol Ann Duffy ended the century with a monologue in which Circe addresses an audience of "nereids and nymphs." The outspoken speech describes the various ways in which all parts of a pig could and should be cooked.

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• 8. Faces, Songs and Science

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  The 6th-century BC Boston kylix shows Circe's victims not only as boars but also as a ram, a dog and a lion. Greek potters often showed the transformation only partially, with an animal head and perhaps a sprouting tail on an otherwise human body. On the Erlangen lekythos, Circe flees from Odysseus's sword and can be seen dropping her bowl and wand behind her. Pausanias described a carved chest of Cypselus with a woman sleeping beside a man in a grotto. He identified them as Odysseus and Circe from the four handmaidens busy with the tasks Homer mentions. An Etruscan coffin in Orvieto shows Odysseus threatening Circe with a drawn sword, and a bronze mirror in the Fitzwilliam Museum names Odysseus and Elpenor beside a pig at her feet.

  In the 18th century, painters began portraying sitters in the character of Circe. Daniel Gardner's pastel "Miss Elliot as Circe" was engraved in 1778 with lines from Milton's Comus. Reynolds painted "Mrs Nesbitt as Circe" in 1781, a lady the Government used as a secret agent. George Romney painted Emma Hamilton as Circe many times. After she moved to Naples, Emma developed what she called her "Attitudes," posing in loose tunics and shawls to evoke figures from classical mythology. Julia Margaret Cameron photographed young Kate Keown as Circe around 1865, in a grape and vineleaf headdress. Madame Yevonde photographed Baroness Dacre as Circe in 1935, clasping a large Baroque porcelain goblet. Franz von Stuck painted the actress Tilla Durieux as Circe in 1913, a year after she played the role in a Viennese revival of Calderon's play.

  Alessandro Stradella's cantata La Circe was first performed at Frascati in 1667. In its opening recitative, Circe explains that her son Telegonus founded the town. Antonio Vivaldi's cantata All'ombra di sospetto, catalogued as RV 678, is famous for its dialogue between flute and voice, conjuring the flirtation before Circe and Ulysses become lovers. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau's poem Circé, from 1703, was written to be a cantata. The first setting, by Jean-Baptiste Morin in 1706, stayed popular for most of the century. A later setting by François Collin de Blamont made the name of its nineteen-year-old composer. Martha Graham's ballet Circe, created in 1963 with a score by Alan Hovhaness, portrays the battle with animal instincts. Its beasts include a goat, a snake, a lion and a deer.

  The botanists of the late 16th century named the genus Circaea, the enchanter's nightshade, believing it to be the herb Circe used on Odysseus's companions. Medical historians have speculated that the transformation into pigs refers not to a literal change but to poisoning with the plant Datura stramonium. Its symptoms include amnesia, hallucinations and delusions. The description of moly fits the snowdrop, which contains galantamine, a long-lasting compound that can counteract that kind of poisoning. Linnaeus named a genus of Venus clams after Circe in 1778, and the asteroid 34 Circe was first sighted in 1855. A family of chess variants called Circe, in which captured pieces are reborn on their starting squares, was formulated in 1968. The enzymologist William Jencks gave the name Circe effect to an enzyme that lures its substrate toward it before transforming it.

  Judith Yarnall, in her survey of the Transformations of Circe, notes that the goddess began as a comparatively minor figure of unclear origin. Yarnall writes that "Circe herself, in the twists and turns of her story through the centuries, has gone through far more metamorphoses than those she inflicted on Odysseus's companions."

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