The choice of evils
Circe describes the strait: on one side is Scylla’s cliff, on the other the whirlpool of Charybdis. She advises Odysseus to steer close to Scylla, because it is better to lose six men than to lose the whole ship. Odysseus asks whether he can fight her, and Circe tells him that she is not mortal and cannot be defeated.
When the ship passes, Scylla snatches six men from the deck while Odysseus is watching for Charybdis. The episode is one of the poem’s bleakest: the hero must choose a smaller catastrophe, and the choice is made before he knows which men will die.
The unheroic monster
Scylla is not a character in the way Polyphemus is. She has no speech and no motive, and her attack is described as a fisherman pulling fish out of the water. The horror lies in her indifference.
Her presence in the Odyssey marks the limit of heroic action. Odysseus can plan, sacrifice, and fight, but against Scylla the only options are loss and survival. The poem accepts the arithmetic and does not pretend that it is noble.
Relations
Backlinks 2
The following entries mention “Scylla”.