Circe’s advice to Odysseus about the passage between Scylla and Charybdis is one of the most brutally practical pieces of counsel in all of Greek literature. She tells him that Charybdis, the whirlpool, will destroy his entire ship if he steers too close to her. Scylla, the six-headed monster on the opposite cliff, will take six men, one for each head, if he steers close to her instead. She recommends Scylla. Losing six men is survivable. Losing the ship is not. She also tells him, pointedly, that she would not advise him to try fighting Scylla. She is immortal. She is invincible. Six men will die and there is nothing Odysseus can do about it except accept that this is the price of getting through.
He follows the advice. He does not tell his crew. Six men are taken from the ship by Scylla’s heads, and Homer records that their screaming was the most pitiful and heart-wrenching thing Odysseus witnessed in ten years of wandering and catastrophe.
Scylla and Charybdis are the pair that gave the English language one of its most enduring idioms, and they have been a byword for impossible choices between terrible alternatives since antiquity. Understanding them properly means understanding them separately, because they are genuinely different kinds of monster with different mythological histories, and the tradition treats them very differently.
Scylla: What Homer Says
Homer’s description of Scylla in Book 12 of the Odyssey is one of the most anatomically specific monster descriptions in ancient literature. She has twelve feet, all waving in the air. She has six necks, enormously long, and on each neck a horrible head with three rows of teeth set close together and full of black death. She lives in a cave halfway up a sheer cliff so high that no human could climb it, barking like a dog from her lair, reaching down to snatch whatever passes within reach of her six heads simultaneously. Six necks, six sailors, one pass through the strait.
Circe also tells Odysseus something that is easy to miss in most retellings: that Scylla’s voice, despite everything else about her, sounds like the voice of a newborn puppy. Not a howl. Not a roar. A small, thin, puppy-like sound. This is unsettling in a way that a simple description of howling would not be, and it is a detail that stays in the mind. The six heads and the twelve feet are terrible. The puppy voice is strange in a different and more disturbing way.
In Homer’s original tradition, Scylla has always been a monster. She is the daughter of Crataeis, a mysterious sea or river goddess, and she has no origin story beyond that. She exists, she kills, she cannot be defeated, and the best anyone can do is accept the toll she takes and move on. That version of Scylla is arguably more frightening than the one later writers invented for her, because it requires no explanation. Some things are simply what they are.
Scylla: The Origin Story Homer Didn’t Tell
Later writers, particularly Ovid in his Metamorphoses, were not satisfied with a monster who simply existed. They gave Scylla a history, and the history they gave her connects directly to the previous article in this series.
In Ovid’s version, Scylla was originally a beautiful sea nymph, loved by the sea god Glaucus. Glaucus asked Circe for a love potion to make Scylla return his feelings. Circe, who had fallen for Glaucus herself, was enraged by the request and poisoned the pool where Scylla bathed instead. When Scylla waded into the water, the lower half of her body transformed into a ring of snarling dog heads on serpentine necks. The beautiful nymph became the six-headed monster of the strait, condemned to a cave in a cliff for the rest of time, taking her horror out on whatever happened to pass beneath her.
This version of the story connects Scylla to Circe, and it means that one of the creatures Circe warns Odysseus about is a monster that Circe herself created. Greek mythology rarely comments on this irony directly. It simply allows it to stand.
A slightly different version replaces Glaucus with Poseidon as the object of Circe’s jealousy. In both cases the mechanism is the same: a beautiful woman is destroyed by the supernatural jealousy of a more powerful woman, and the result is a creature who takes her suffering out on sailors who have nothing to do with the situation that made her what she is. The six men Scylla takes from Odysseus’s ship did not put her in that cave. They simply happened to be passing through the strait at the wrong moment.
Charybdis: The Whirlpool That Nearly Ended Odysseus Twice
Charybdis is less described and less individualised than Scylla in Homer, and this is a significant difference that most accounts of the two monsters flatten. Scylla is a specific creature with specific anatomy in a specific cave. Charybdis is a whirlpool, or is the cause of a whirlpool, and Homer is somewhat ambiguous about whether she is a monster who produces the whirlpool or simply is the whirlpool itself.
What Homer is clear about is the mechanism and the schedule. Three times a day Charybdis sucks down the dark water, exposing the sea floor and the rocks beneath, and three times a day she vomits it back up in a seething, boiling mass. When she is swallowing, nothing that enters her can escape. Homer notes that not even Poseidon could save a ship caught in her pull. She is, in this sense, an absolute force rather than a creature with motivations or history: a natural disaster given a name and a location.
Her origin story, when the tradition provides one, is likewise different in character from Scylla’s. She is described in some accounts as the daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, once a woman who stole cattle from Heracles and was punished by Zeus, who struck her with a thunderbolt and cast her into the sea, where she became the whirlpool. In this version she is not a victim of another’s jealousy but a transgressor receiving a proportionate divine punishment, fixed to the seabed and condemned to swallow and vomit the sea forever as restitution for the cattle she stole.
Odysseus encounters Charybdis twice. The first time he follows Circe’s advice, steers close to Scylla, loses his six men, and gets through. The second time he is not so fortunate. After his crew eat the cattle of Helios against explicit divine prohibition, Zeus destroys their ship with a thunderbolt in the subsequent storm. Odysseus survives by clinging to the wreckage, but the storm blows him back to the strait. He arrives at Charybdis at the moment when she is sucking everything down. He grabs the branch of a fig tree growing from the cliff above her and hangs there, watching his ship’s timbers disappear into the vortex, until the moment when she vomits everything back up. He drops into the water, grabs the timbers, and paddles away from the strait on what remains of his ship. It is the closest he comes to death in the entire Odyssey, and he survives it entirely alone, with no crew, no Circe, no divine intervention. Just the fig tree branch and precise timing.
The Real Geography
The ancient world was fairly certain that Scylla and Charybdis were located in the Strait of Messina, the narrow channel between Calabria in southern Italy and the island of Sicily. Virgil places them there explicitly in the Aeneid, where Aeneas is warned to take a long detour around Sicily rather than risk the strait. The coastal town of Scilla in Calabria still bears the name of the monster, and the rocks off its shore are still called the Faraglioni di Scilla.
The Strait of Messina is genuinely dangerous. It is narrow, the currents are complex and unpredictable, and there are whirlpools produced by the meeting of tidal flows from the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas. For ancient sailors in relatively small wooden ships with no engines, navigating it without local knowledge was a genuinely serious proposition. The myth of Scylla and Charybdis may encode real maritime knowledge in a memorable form: the message that the strait requires you to choose which of its hazards to accept because avoiding both is not an option.
This is a function that Greek mythology performs repeatedly. The Sirens sit on an island near the strait. The Symplegades, the clashing rocks that Jason had to navigate on the way to Colchis, encode the dangers of the Black Sea entrance. The monsters at the boundaries of the known world are often geography, translated into the language of creatures because creatures are easier to remember and to pass down than navigational charts.
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Sign up here →The Phrase and What It Means
Between Scylla and Charybdis has been in use as an idiom for at least two thousand years, meaning to be caught between two dangers where avoiding one makes the other more likely. It is the ancient equivalent of between a rock and a hard place, and it is considerably more precisely calibrated than that phrase because the Odyssey is specific about the asymmetry between the two options.
Scylla will definitely take six men. Charybdis might take the whole ship. The rational choice, as Circe explains it, is to accept the certain loss of six to avoid the probable loss of everything. This is not comfortable reasoning. Odysseus does not tell his crew because he knows that if they understood the calculation, they might refuse to proceed. He makes the decision that the six men whose names he knows will die so that the rest will live, and then he watches it happen and keeps sailing.
The idiom captures the structure of the choice but not its emotional weight. The phrase is almost always used lightly, to describe inconvenient dilemmas with two unpleasant options. The original is considerably grimmer: a captain choosing which of his men to sacrifice, knowing exactly what he is choosing, unable to do anything to save them when the moment comes.
For more on the monsters Odysseus encountered, the Sirens article covers the creatures he passed just before reaching the strait. The Circe article covers the sorceress whose advice shaped how Odysseus navigated both threats. The broader Ancient Mythology section has more on the world of the Odyssey.
