Scylla

• 1. Introduction

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  Scylla is a man-eating sea monster from Greek mythology, stationed on one side of a narrow channel of water so close to the opposite shore that an arrow could cross it. On that other side lurks Charybdis, a different horror entirely, a whirlpool that could swallow a ship whole. Sailors caught between them faced an impossible arithmetic: steer toward Charybdis and risk losing everything, or hug the rocky cliff where Scylla waits, and lose only a few men to her jaws.

  Who, or what, was Scylla before she became a monster? How did she end up there? Why do so many different ancient authors disagree about her parents, her transformation, and even whether she was ever real at all? And what drew centuries of European painters, poets, and composers to her story long after the age of sail had moved on?

• 2. A Monster's Origins

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  Homer, the earliest source to record Scylla, names Crataeis as her mother but says nothing at all about a father. Later authors could not leave that gap alone. Apollodorus proposed that her father was either Triton or Phorkys. A scholiast commenting on Plato suggested Tyrrhenus or Phorcus. Eustathius, annotating the twelfth book of the Odyssey, went further still, naming Poseidon himself as her father alongside Crataeis.

  Other traditions replace the mother entirely. The Hesiodic Megalai Ehoiai names Hecate and Phorbas as Scylla’s parents, while Acusilaus pairs Hecate with Phorkys instead. Hyginus, working from a different strain of myth altogether, makes Scylla the offspring of Typhon and Echidna, two of the most feared monsters in the Greek cosmos.

  Apollonius of Rhodes tried to resolve the conflict by arguing that Crataeis was simply another name for Hecate, making her and Phorcys the agreed parents. Semos of Delos built a longer genealogy still, making Crataeis the daughter of Hecate and Triton, and then the mother of Scylla by a figure named Deimos. Stesichorus, alone among ancient writers, names Lamia as the mother, possibly the same Lamia who was a daughter of Poseidon.

• 3. From Nymph to Monster

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  John Tzetzes and Servius, in his commentary on Virgil's Aeneid, preserve a version in which Scylla begins her existence as a beautiful naiad. Poseidon desires her, and his consort Amphitrite, consumed by jealousy, poisons the spring where Scylla bathed, twisting her into a monster.

  Ovid's account in the Metamorphoses redirects the jealousy. There, the fisherman-turned-sea-god Glaucus falls in love with Scylla, but she is repulsed by his partly fish body and flees to a headland he cannot reach. Glaucus then visits Circe and asks for a love potion. Circe, however, falls for Glaucus herself. Rejected by him, she turns her fury onto Scylla, pouring a vial of poison into the sea pool where the nymph regularly swam. Scylla then transforms into something terrifying even to herself, with six dog forms springing from her thighs.

  The Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda preserves the fullest physical description: a beautiful woman from the waist up, six dog heads mounted on each side of her body, and a serpent for a lower half. A late Greek myth recorded by both Eustathius and Tzetzes adds one more episode. During a journey to Sicily, Heracles encountered Scylla and killed her. Her father Phorcys then applied burning torches to her body and restored her to life.

• 4. Odysseus at the Strait

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  In Book Twelve of the Odyssey, Circe gives Odysseus frank tactical advice before he reaches the strait. She tells him to hug Scylla's cliff and sail past at full speed, keeping the loss to six men rather than risking the entire ship to Charybdis. She also tells him to invoke Crataeis, Scylla's mother, and ask her to hold Scylla back so the monster strikes only once.

  Odysseus follows the first part of the advice. He does not, crucially, tell his crew what he knows. When Charybdis briefly draws their attention, Scylla snatches six sailors from the deck and devours them alive. The passage is among the most viscerally specific in the Odyssey, and Scylla's appearance there is the earliest datable record of the monster in any surviving text.

  The strait itself was given a physical address by later tradition. Book Three of Virgil's Aeneid locates it at the Strait of Messina, the narrow channel between Calabria in southern Italy and the island of Sicily. The coastal town of Scilla in Calabria carries the mythological name to this day, and local tradition holds that it was the home of the nymph before her transformation.

• 5. Rationalists and Revisers

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  Palaephatus, a writer who made a project of stripping myth down to plausible historical events, offered a striking alternative reading. Scylla, he argued, was never a monster at all. She was a fast Tyrrhenian warship, her name painted on the prow, deployed during a period when Tyrrhenian vessels were raiding the coasts of Sicily and the Ionian Gulf. The ship was so swift and so effective at coordinating other vessels that it became famous along the whole route.

  In Palaephatus’s reconstruction, Odysseus escaped pursuit from this vessel by catching a favorable wind, then later described both the ship and the chase to King Alcinous in Corcyra. Successive retellings transformed a maritime memory into a six-headed creature.

  Heraclitus Paradoxographus took a different angle, proposing that Scylla was a courtesan who lived on an island and surrounded herself with avaricious followers who behaved like dogs, preying on sailors who came to shore. She could deceive most men, he wrote, but not Odysseus, because he was consistently cautious and shrewd.

  The Byzantine author Procopius brought yet another explanation. He reported that the place called Scylaeum was associated with Scylla not because any beast-woman had lived there, but because a fish formerly called "scylax" and later renamed "cyniscus" had been caught in large numbers in that part of the strait since ancient times. Names, Procopius observed, begin as accurate labels, then travel through rumor until ignorance of the original facts produces false impressions, and poets eventually fill the gaps with invention.

• 6. Artists and the Myth

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  At the Carolingian abbey of Corvey in Westphalia, a ninth-century wall painting shows Odysseus fighting Scylla. Scholars note that this illustration has no known parallel in any other medieval work.

  By the Renaissance, the story of Glaucus and Scylla had displaced the Homeric encounter as the version that fired visual imaginations. Agostino Carracci's 1597 fresco cycle The Loves of the Gods, painted in the Farnese Gallery, includes the pair in an embrace, a detail that has no support in any version of the myth. More faithfully rendered are works showing Scylla pulling away from Glaucus, including a painting on copper by Filippo Lauri and a canvas by Salvator Rosa now at the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Caen.

  Bartholomaeus Spranger, working in 1587, painted them separated by their respective domains of land and sea; that canvas is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Laurent de la Hyre, in a painting of 1640-44 held in the J. Paul Getty Museum, adds Cupid taking aim at Glaucus, as does Jacques Dumont le Romain in a 1726 work at the Musee des beaux-arts de Troyes. J. M. W. Turner, in a late painting of 1841 now at the Kimbell Art Museum, placed two cupids fluttering near the fleeing Scylla.

  Peter Paul Rubens, painting around 1636, captured the exact moment when Scylla begins to change under Glaucus's gaze. Eglon van der Neer's 1695 painting in the Rijksmuseum shows Circe dropping the poison as Scylla prepares to bathe. John Melhuish Strudwick in 1886 and John William Waterhouse in 1892, with his painting Circe Invidiosa, both returned to the poisoning scene from a Pre-Raphaelite perspective.

  The myth also found its way into opera. The French composer Jean-Marie Leclair adapted the Glaucus and Scylla story into a five-act tragic opera titled Scylla et Glaucus, first performed in 1746.

• 7. Keats and the Long Afterlife

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  John Keats, writing in 1818, took Ovid’s version of the Glaucus and Scylla story as a starting point for Book Three of his poem Endymion, then changed it substantially. In Keats, Circe does not transform Scylla into a monster. She simply kills her. Glaucus carries her body to a crystal palace at the bottom of the ocean, where it lies alongside the corpses of every lover who has ever drowned at sea. After a thousand years, Endymion arrives and resurrects her, returning her to Glaucus.

  The idiom produced by the Homeric encounter has outlasted the poem, the operas, and the paintings in everyday speech. To be "between Scylla and Charybdis" means to face two options that are equally dangerous or unpleasant, roughly equivalent to being "between a rock and a hard place." The phrase carries the original logic intact: the strait was so narrow that avoiding one hazard meant steering toward the other, and there was no third route.