Scylla and Charybdis: Through the Strait by Night

The Strait of Messina is barely three kilometres wide at its northern end. On the Calabrian side, the town of Scilla huddles beneath a castle on a high rock; on the Sicilian side, the low point of Capo Peloro looks across at it, and between them the currents of two seas meet and argue. The Athenian historian Thucydides already knew this water as the Charybdis through which Odysseus was said to have sailed, and explained its danger plainly: the strait is narrow, and the Tyrrhenian and Sicilian seas pour into it from either end. The myth gave that danger two faces, one above the water and one below it. One of them, according to the later poets, had once been a girl.

The nymph who would not marry

Ovid tells Scylla’s story across books 13 and 14 of the Metamorphoses. She was a nymph of the Sicilian shore who turned away every suitor and liked to visit the sea nymphs, telling them how she had escaped young men’s attentions. It is while she combs Galatea’s hair that the Nereid tells her the grim tale of Polyphemus and Acis. Then a new suitor rises from the water: Glaucus, once a fisherman from Anthedon in Boeotia, who ate a strange herb that revived the fish on his catch and was changed into a sea god with a green beard and a fish’s tail. Scylla takes one look and flees to the top of a cliff.

Rejected, Glaucus goes to the halls of Circe, the Sun’s daughter, to ask for a love charm. Circe wants him for herself. He answers that leaves will grow in the sea and seaweed on the mountaintops before his love changes while Scylla lives. Circe cannot hurt the god she loves, so she turns on the rival. She grinds herbs with dreadful juices, sings the spells of Hecate, and poisons the little bay, curved like a bow, where Scylla rests in the noon heat. Scylla wades in up to her waist and sees her body ringed with barking beasts. At first she does not understand that they are part of her. She tries to run from them and drags them with her. Where her thighs and feet had been there are only the jaws of dogs.

Ovid says she stayed rooted there, and that out of hatred for Circe she later snatched away Ulysses’ companions; in the end she was turned into the rock that sailors still avoid. Hyginus tells the same story in a few lines and makes Scylla the child of the river Crataeis. The older sources disagree about her family. Homer names her mother Crataeis, a word that means something like “the mighty one”; Apollonius of Rhodes makes her the daughter of Phorcys and Hecate, who is called Crataeis. Virgil, in one of his Eclogues, even blends her with a different Scylla, the princess of Megara who betrayed her father, a confusion Roman readers seem to have found natural.

Six heads in a cloud

Homer knows nothing of the transformation. His Scylla, described by Circe in book 12 of the Odyssey, is simply an immortal evil, and Odysseus is told not to fight her.

There Scylla lives, yelping horribly. Her voice is no louder than a newborn puppy’s, but she is an evil monster, and no one would be glad to see her, not even a god. She has twelve feet, all dangling, and six necks of great length, and on each a terrible head with three rows of teeth, close-set and thick, full of black death.

Homer, Odyssey 12 (our rendering)

Her cave faces west toward the darkness of Erebus, half-way up a sheer cliff whose peak is always wrapped in cloud, clear neither in summer nor at harvest time. She fishes from it for dolphins, dogfish and the bigger creatures that Amphitrite breeds. A bowshot away lies a lower rock with a great fig tree on it, and under it Charybdis three times a day sucks down the dark water and three times spews it up again. Better, Circe says, to lose six men to Scylla than the whole ship to Charybdis.

So it happens. Odysseus, forgetting her advice, puts on his armour and stands in the bow. While the crew stare in terror at Charybdis, which seethes like a cauldron over a fire and then opens to show the dark sand of the seabed, Scylla takes six men from the deck. They cry out his name as she lifts them, writhing like fish on the line of an angler casting from a headland. It was, Odysseus says, the most pitiful thing he saw on all his journeys.

Back through the dark

Odysseus came this way a second time. After his crew eat the cattle of the Sun, Zeus shatters the ship with a thunderbolt, and Odysseus lashes keel and mast together with a strap of oxhide and rides the wreck. The west wind dies and the south wind rises, pushing him back the way he came. All night he is carried, he says, and with the rising sun he reaches Scylla’s rock and dreadful Charybdis.

That night crossing is told in a handful of lines, but it is one of the loneliest moments in the poem. A man with no oar and no stars to steer by drifts in the dark toward the one place he most wants to avoid. When the whirlpool swallows the wreck, he leaps up to the fig tree and hangs there like a bat, unable to climb or to find a foothold, and waits for the sea to give his timbers back. Homer tells the hour by the routine of a town: the timbers rise again at the time when a man leaves the assembly for his supper after judging the quarrels of young men. The strait keeps its own clock, and the hero has to wait for it. Then he drops, paddles with his hands, and Zeus keeps Scylla from seeing him.

Virgil gives the Trojans a night of their own here. In book 3 of the Aeneid, the seer Helenus tells Aeneas to take the long way round Sicily rather than risk the strait. When they hear the roar of Charybdis, the ships swing hard to port; the waves lift them to the sky and drop them to the depths, and three times, Aeneas recalls, they saw the stars drenched with spray. Spat out by the strait at sunset, they drift ashore in darkness on the coast of the Cyclopes, where they soon see blinded Polyphemus wading into the sea.

The ship that made it through

One crew came through these waters without losing anyone. In the Argonautica of Apollonius, Hera asks the Nereid Thetis to guide the Argo, and Thetis brings her sisters. With Scylla’s smooth rock on one side and Charybdis roaring on the other, the Nereids lift the ship through the Wandering Rocks, tossing it from hand to hand like girls on a beach throwing a ball to one another, while Hephaestus leans on his hammer at the top of a cliff to watch and Hera clutches Athena in fear.

That ship is in the sky. The poet Aratus describes Argo as drawn stern-first, the way sailors turn a ship to beach it. From most of Canada only her upper deck rises, low in the south on late-winter evenings, and her brightest star, Canopus, never clears the horizon. Find the chart in our Sky Atlas, and meet the sisters who steered her in our article on the Nereids.

The strait also left the language a proverb. A medieval Latin poet, Walter of Châtillon, wrote that you fall into Scylla while trying to avoid Charybdis, and Erasmus included the idea in his collection of adages. We still say “between Scylla and Charybdis” for a choice with no safe side, which is exactly what Circe offered Odysseus on that night beach on Aeaea.