Circe- Greek GodDeity"Dread Goddess of Human Speech"

Daughter of Helios

Circe dwells on the island of Aeaea, which Homer sets near the dwelling of Eos, where the sun rises and has her dancing grounds. Her palace stands in a forest clearing, surrounded by wild animals that move with disturbing tameness: mountain lions and wolves that fawn upon visitors like household pets. These beasts were once men, transformed by Circe's drugs but retaining enough of their human minds to feel shame at their condition.

She is the daughter of Helios, who drives the sun across the sky, and the Oceanid Perse. Her siblings include Aeëtes, the king of Colchis who possessed the Golden Fleece, and Pasiphaë, the queen of Crete whose unnatural passion for a bull produced the Minotaur.

The Men Become Pigs

The Odyssey provides the most detailed account of Circe's encounter with mortals. When Odysseus's ship landed on Aeaea after escaping the Laestrygonian giants, who had destroyed eleven of his twelve ships, he sent a scouting party of twenty-two men led by Eurylochus to explore the island. They found Circe's house in a forest clearing, with the enchanted wolves and lions prowling outside, and heard her singing as she worked at her loom. Homer calls her polypharmakos, "skilled in many drugs."

Circe welcomed the visitors and invited them to feast. She mixed a potion into their food: cheese, barley, honey, and Pramnian wine, laced with "baneful drugs to make them utterly forget their native land." When they had eaten and drunk, she struck them with her wand and drove them into her pigsties. They took on the form, bristles, and voice of swine, but their minds remained human. They wept as they ate the mast and acorns that Circe scattered before them.

Eurylochus alone had remained outside, suspecting treachery. He fled back to the ship and told Odysseus what had happened. Odysseus set out alone to rescue his men.

The Moly and the Confrontation

On his way through the forest, Odysseus encountered Hermes in the guise of a young man. The god knew what awaited him and offered both warning and protection. He described how Circe would drug his drink and then use her wand to transform him, and revealed that Odysseus would be immune if he took the herb moly. This plant, said Hermes, was "difficult for mortal men to dig up, but the gods can do all things." It had a black root and a milk-white flower.

Armed with this divine protection, Odysseus went to Circe's house and accepted her hospitality. When her potion failed to work, she struck him with her wand, commanding him to join his fellows in the sty. Instead, Odysseus drew his sword and rushed at her as if to kill her. Circe, astonished, fell at his knees and recognised him: "You must be Odysseus of the nimble wits, whose coming Hermes of the golden wand always told me to expect." The god had prophesied that a man would come whom her magic could not touch.

She invited him to her bed, but Odysseus made her swear a binding oath by the gods that she would work no further harm against him. Only then did he accept her embrace. At his demand, she restored his companions to human form. Homer notes that they emerged younger and more beautiful than before, and they wept with joy at their restoration.

A Year on Aeaea

Odysseus and his crew remained on Aeaea for a full year, feasting on the abundant meat and wine that Circe provided. Time passed easily, and it took the crew's eventual protest ("Strange man, it is time to think of your own country") to remind Odysseus of his purpose.

When he asked Circe for help returning home, she told him the journey was not yet over. Before he could reach Ithaca, he must sail to the edge of the world and descend to the House of Hades to consult the prophet Tiresias, whose mind remains unclouded even in death. Only the dead seer could tell him how to complete his voyage. Circe gave him precise instructions: where to dig the sacrificial pit, what blood offerings to pour, and how to summon Tiresias from among the shades.

After Odysseus returned from the underworld, Circe warned him of the dangers ahead. She told him to plug his men's ears with beeswax against the Sirens' song and to choose Scylla's strait over Charybdis's whirlpool, accepting the loss of six men rather than risking the entire ship. She warned him above all not to touch the cattle of Helios on Thrinacia. Her father's herds were sacred, and Helios would never forgive the theft.

The Argonauts' Purification

When Jason and the Argonauts escaped Colchis with the Golden Fleece and with Medea, Aeëtes's daughter, they sought purification from Circe for the murder of Medea's brother Absyrtus. Apollonius Rhodius describes the encounter: Circe performed the cleansing rites, slaughtering a suckling pig, washing their hands with its blood, and making offerings to Zeus Katharsios. Then she ordered them from her island, horrified by the nature of their crime even as she cleansed them of its pollution.

The Sorceress Spurned

Circe's power turned lethal when her desires were thwarted. The sea-god Glaucus came to her begging for a love potion to win the beautiful nymph Scylla, but Circe fell in love with Glaucus instead. Rejected, she poisoned the waters of the cove where Scylla bathed. When the nymph waded in, her lower body erupted into a ring of snarling dogs and serpents. She became the six-headed monster of the strait who would later devour six of Odysseus's men. The Italian king Picus suffered a similar fate: when he spurned Circe's advances while hunting in the forest, she transformed him into a woodpecker.

Telegonus and the End of Odysseus

Later Greek traditions extended Circe's story beyond the Odyssey. According to the lost epic Telegony, Circe bore Odysseus a son named Telegonus during his year on Aeaea. When Telegonus grew to manhood, he set out to find his father. Landing on Ithaca without recognising the island, he began raiding for supplies. Odysseus came out to defend his territory, and Telegonus killed him with a spear tipped with the spine of a stingray, a weapon given him by Circe. The killing fulfilled a prophecy that death would come to Odysseus "from the sea."

In the aftermath, Telegonus took Odysseus's body back to Aeaea, accompanied by Penelope and Telemachus. Circe made them all immortal. In the Telegony, she married Telemachus while Telegonus married Penelope. Hesiod's Theogony names Agrius and Latinus as further sons of Circe and Odysseus, the latter giving his name to the Latin people of Italy.