Circe, Daughter of the Sun

After two days lying on the beach in exhaustion and grief, Odysseus climbs a rocky lookout on an unknown island and sees smoke rising through the thick oak woods. He goes back to his men and makes a confession that should alarm anyone who has ever found their way by the sky: friends, he says, we do not know where the darkness is or where the dawn, where the Sun who brings light to mortals goes beneath the earth or where he rises. Odysseus has landed, without knowing it, on the island of the Sun’s own daughter, and he cannot tell where the Sun rises.

A household of light

Homer introduces her in four lines. On the island of Aeaea lived Circe of the lovely hair, a dread goddess with a human voice, sister of the harsh-minded Aeetes; both were children of Helios, who gives light to mortals, and their mother was Perse, a daughter of Ocean. Hesiod’s Theogony gives the same family: the Oceanid Perseis bore Circe and King Aeetes to the tireless Sun.

It is a remarkable family. Aeetes rules Colchis at the eastern end of the Black Sea and keeps the Golden Fleece; his daughter is Medea. Another sister, Pasiphae, married Minos of Crete and bore Ariadne, Phaedra and, notoriously, the Minotaur. Helios had other children who show up in the Odyssey: the nymphs Lampetie and Phaethousa, who tend his cattle on Thrinacia. Ovid adds Phaethon, the boy who begged for one day at the reins of his father’s chariot and fell burning into the river Eridanus. Herbs, potions and fire run through this bloodline.

Apollonius of Rhodes turns that inheritance into something you can see. In the Argonautica, Jason and Medea arrive at Aeaea to be purified after a murder, and Circe knows her niece before a word is spoken, because every descendant of Helios was easy to recognize: their eyes shot out a gleam of gold. Homer, for his part, sets Aeaea where the Sun’s family belongs. When Odysseus returns there from the land of the dead, the poet calls it the island where early-born Dawn has her house and her dancing floors, and where Helios rises. Circe’s brother lives at the eastern edge of the world in Aia; Circe lives on Aeaea, at the place of sunrise.

The cup, the wand and the sty

Odysseus divides his crew and sends Eurylochus ahead with twenty-two men. In the glade around Circe’s stone house they meet mountain wolves and lions, which do not attack but fawn on them like dogs greeting a master home from dinner; Homer explains that Circe has bewitched them with her drugs. Inside, she is singing at a great loom, weaving the fine, shining work of goddesses. She invites them in and mixes them a kykeon of cheese, barley meal and pale honey in Pramnian wine, with drugs that make them forget their native land.

Then she strikes them with her wand. They take on the heads, voices, bristles and bodies of pigs, but their minds stay as they were before. Circe pens them in sties and throws them acorns and cornel berries, the food of swine that wallow on the ground. Only Eurylochus, who suspected a trap and stayed outside, runs back to the ship with the news.

A black root and a milk-white flower

Odysseus sets out alone. On the path he meets Hermes in the shape of a young man with the first down on his lip, who tells him how to survive. When Circe strikes with her wand, Odysseus must draw his sword and rush at her as if to kill her; she will then invite him to her bed, and he must make her swear the great oath of the gods that she will plot no further harm. For protection against the cup, Hermes gives him something from the ground.

So speaking, the Slayer of Argus gave me the herb, pulling it from the earth, and showed me its nature. At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. The gods call it moly; it is hard for mortal men to dig up, but the gods can do all things.

Homer, Odyssey 10 (our rendering)

The plan works. The drugged cup has no effect, Circe falls at his knees, and she guesses at once who he must be: Odysseus of many turns, whose coming Hermes had always foretold. She swears the oath, anoints the pigs with a new drug, and the men become men again, younger than before, taller and far handsomer. The crew stay on Aeaea for a whole year of feasting before they remind their captain of home.

What was moly? The ancient answer is that it is a word from the language of the gods, and Homer may mean us not to find it. Theophrastus, the great botanist of the fourth century BCE, nevertheless reported a moly growing near Pheneus and on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, with a round root like an onion and a leaf like a squill, used against spells. Modern guesses range widely. Linnaeus gave the name Allium moly to a yellow-flowered wild garlic. In 1983 two physicians proposed the snowdrop, whose bulbs contain galantamine, a compound that can counter the stupor caused by some poisonous plants. Each fits part of the description; none fits all of it.

From the house of Dawn to the setting sun

Circe becomes Odysseus’ most important guide. She sends him to the house of Hades to consult the prophet Teiresias, and when he returns she sits with him through the night, describing the Sirens, the Wandering Rocks and the strait of Scylla and Charybdis. Above all, she warns him not to touch the cattle of the Sun on Thrinacia. They are her father’s herds. When the crew eat them anyway, Helios threatens to go down into the underworld and shine among the dead unless he is avenged, and Zeus destroys the ship.

A passage at the end of Hesiod’s Theogony, probably a later addition, already gives the pair children: Circe bore Odysseus two sons, Agrius and Latinus, who ruled the Tyrrhenians far off in the holy islands. A lost epic, the Telegony, told of a third, Telegonus, who came looking for his father and killed him by mistake. By then the myth was drifting west, and Italians came to identify Aeaea with Monte Circeo, a headland on the coast of Latium that Theophrastus says was once an island. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan ships skirt this shore by night. Circe burns fragrant cedar to light her loom in the dark, and the sailors hear lions growling in their chains, boars and bears raging in their pens and the howling of great wolves, men she has changed. Neptune fills the sails to carry them safely past.

Ovid’s Circe is crueller still: she turns the king Picus into a woodpecker and, out of jealousy, poisons the bathing pool of the nymph Scylla. So the daughter of the house of Dawn ended up on the western shore, where the sun sets into the sea. Her own name is not among the constellations, but her half-brother’s river is: follow Eridanus from Orion’s foot in our Sky Atlas. And for the song she warned Odysseus about, turn to the Sirens.