A Thousand Ships(64)

After that cluster of cannibals you met on the start of your voyage, Odysseus – the blinded Cyclops, the Laestrygonians who ate your crew or smashed their ships with rocks – you now seem to have entered the sea-monster section of your journey. Who knew there could be so many kinds? First, you survived your brush with a musical death. And then you had to sail past Scylla and Charybdis. The former is a man-eating monster, the latter is a ship-eating whirlpool: have I got that right?

This route was Circe’s idea, I believe. I find myself wondering if you might have annoyed her in some way. Hard to imagine how, of course. But she does seem to have advised you to take the most perilous journey any man could hope to sail. And though the continuing wrath of Poseidon is clearly your doing, the sea-monsters are a nice touch of hers. She would rather you drown, I think, than sail home to your wife and son.

Because otherwise she would have sent you a different way. You see, there are two routes, as the bard sings it, between Aeaea and Ithaca. Two routes, Odysseus, neither of which you have managed to traverse successfully. One takes you through the Wandering Rocks, a narrow passage between two steep cliffs, against which huge waves smash and break. Had you trusted your helmsman to hold his course and steer down the middle of these rocks, you might well have been home by now. They say Jason sailed safely through these straits with the help of Hera. Perhaps she might have extended her help to you, too.

But instead, Circe sent you through a different strait, between a second set of terrible cliffs. Two vast peaks nestling beneath an angry sky. The tallest rock is so high that its crest is invisible, always covered in cloud. It is so smooth that no one could climb it: no footholds or handholds mark its gleaming stone. There is an opening in the rock, however, which Circe told you no mortal man can make out from the deck of his ship beneath (I can almost see your expression as she told you this. No other mortal man, maybe. But you are not like other men. Is this what swung your decision to try this route? The chance to reveal yourself, once again, as better than any other Greek? It seems all too likely). And in that dank cave dwells Scylla, a terrifying monster with twelve legs and six heads. Each head has three rows of teeth and each tooth is lethally sharp. No passing ship is safe from her, for each of her six heads will suddenly appear from her cave as a ship goes by. Each head will open its gaping maw. And each mouth will seize a sailor between its vicious jaws. And six men will be lost.

So the temptation must be to avoid this higher rock and sail closer to the lower of the two peaks, which lies opposite. You could shoot an arrow from one to the other, Odysseus, so narrow is the space between these two rocks. This second rock is not so steep, and on its peak grows a huge fig tree. Imagine that, a fig tree growing on a bare rock in the middle of the sea. How strange it must look. And beneath the fig tree, at the base of the rock, is Charybdis. And where Scylla eats men, Charybdis eats ships. A monstrous whirlpool that drinks down the ocean water three times a day, and then spits it back up. The water may survive this hideous journey, but your vessel – churned into splinters – would not.

I know you, Odysseus. There is no chance that you were told of these twin perils and did not try to concoct a plan which would allow you to pass between the whirlpool and the monster, unscathed. Could you not have steered clear of Charybdis, but approached Scylla with sword drawn, ready to chop off her voracious heads? Circe would have told you, I think, that Scylla does not have the frailty of a mortal neck, or six. Try to fight her, Circe would have said, and you simply give her enough time to swallow the men she has taken, and make a second attack. Your only choice was between losing six men or twelve. Losing no men was not an option.

So because of Circe, or perhaps in spite of her, you took the route past Scylla and Charybdis, the smooth, high rock on your right, the fig-tree on your left. You skirted Scylla’s rock and lost six men. You looked back to hear them screaming your name, dangling from her multiple jaws like so many fish on hooks. You will have found this especially painful, I think, more so than the cannibals and the crews they drowned, more than the Cyclops and its vicious unseeing eye. You never have liked to see a man deprived of the chance to defend himself. It offends your sense of justice.

And at the same time, you heard the deafening roar of seawater foaming into the whirlpool of Charybdis, but even then you did not lose heart. Your ship was just far enough over to come through safely, although you had been close enough to see the black sand and bedrock, when she had swallowed all the water from above her.

Terrifying though this journey was, you made it through the straits to the safety of Thrinacia, a lovely, verdant island sacred to Helios. It scarcely needs saying – does it? – that Circe had given you one more instruction. If you chose to land at Thrinacia, you had to be sure not to harm any of the cattle there, because they belong to Hyperion, the father of Helios, and he takes a dim view of losing even one of them to a ragtag bunch of sailors. The safer course would have been to sail right past, but how could you tell your men – exhausted and frightened by the voyage through the straits and the loss of six of their remaining comrades – that they should sail past an island which contained nothing more lethal than cows and sheep?

Even the bard does not pretend that you didn’t warn your men, Odysseus. He has line after line about how you repeated the warnings given to you twice over, once by Circe and once by Tiresias in the Underworld. But your men were no longer willing to obey your instructions on this matter. You had led them through so much danger, and they had lost so many friends. No wonder they overruled you and made for the shores of Thrinacia, just for one night. Just to allow themselves time to recover from their trauma and rest a while on dry land. Even then you did not let them go blindly to their deaths. You made them swear an oath that they would leave Hyperion’s creatures alone. And they obeyed you gladly. What was one night without meat? They would soon be sailing home to Ithaca.