(Apologoi continuing; covers a span of more than a year, from soon after the Cyclops episode to the journey toward the Underworld)

The twelve ships make landfall on the floating island of Aeolus, the wind-king — a bronze-walled palace circled by an unbroken cliff. Aeolus keeps perpetual feast with his six sons and six daughters (married to each other, brother to sister). He entertains Ulysses for a month, hears every Trojan story, and at parting flays a prime nine-year-old ox and stitches its hide into a great bag in which he binds all the winds that blow save the West, which alone is freed to send the ship home. The bag is tied with a silver thread and stowed in the hold; the West blows; nine days and nights they sail; on the tenth Ithaca rises, close enough that they could see the men tending the fires on the headlands. Ulysses, who has not slept once in nine days at the helm, drops at last asleep.

The crew, certain the leather sack holds the gold and silver Aeolus has given Ulysses privately, untie it. Out rush all the winds at once. The storm catches them up and blows them straight back to the Aeolian island. Ulysses goes ashore in shame with a herald and one man and supplicates the king again. Aeolus rises from his feast in horror: vilest of mortals, off this island at once. I cannot help a man the gods so plainly hate. They row away, no wind, six days of dead labour.

The seventh day brings them to Telepylus, city of the Laestrygonians, a colossal harbour with cliffs all around and a narrow neck. A man who could do without sleep would earn double wages here, for the herdsman who drives his cattle in by night calls to the herdsman driving his sheep out by day. Eleven ships anchor inside the calm circle; Ulysses moors his own outside the mouth. He sends three scouts. They meet at a spring the king's daughter, the size of a hill, drawing water. She leads them to the palace; out comes Antiphates her father, who seizes one man and eats him on the spot. The other two flee. The king roars; the Laestrygonians come to the cliff-tops in giant numbers and throw down rocks that smash the eleven ships, then spear the men struggling in the water like fishes, and carry them off to eat. Ulysses cuts his own ship's cable with his sword and they row for their lives. One ship and one crew of fifty-or-so men is all that remains of twelve.

Two days exhausted on the beach of Circe's island Aeaea. On the third dawn Ulysses takes spear and sword inland, kills a great stag with antlers like a tree, carries it back across his shoulders, feeds the men. They weep for the Laestrygonians and the Cyclops dead. He divides them into two companies for scouting: his own and Eurylochus's. They draw lots from a bronze helmet; Eurylochus's lot springs out. Eurylochus takes twenty-two men and goes.

In a clearing they find a stone palace surrounded by wolves and lions of the mountains, monstrous to look at, that wagged their tails and rubbed against the men like dogs — Circe's drugged beasts, men once, now contented. From the hall they hear a beautiful voice singing at a loom — Polites, the man Ulysses loved best of all, says: let us call her, whether she is a woman or a goddess. They call. Circe comes out, smiling, and invites them in. All twenty-two enter; only Eurylochus, suspicious, stays at the gate.

She seats them on chairs and brings a Pramnian-wine mess with cheese and honey and barley-meal, into which she has stirred a drug to make them forget their fathers' country. They drink. She strikes them with her wand. They grew the heads and bristles and shape of swine, but their minds remained human as before. She drives them into pig-pens, throws them acorns to eat, and goes back to her loom.

Eurylochus runs to the ship and cannot speak for weeping; at last he tells what he saw and beseeches Ulysses to put to sea while they still can. Ulysses takes sword and bow and goes alone, ordering Eurylochus to remain. He could not bring himself to go again. Through the wood, alone, Ulysses meets Hermes in the form of a young man, the down just on his cheek, who takes his hand. Where do you go alone in this place, fool? Circe will turn you into a pig with the others. Here, take this herb. He pulls a plant out of the ground — black at the root, milk-white at the flower — moly the gods call it; men cannot dig it up. Carry it. When she strikes you with the wand and bids you to the sty, draw your sword and rush her as if to kill. She will fall back terrified and ask you to her bed. Do not refuse — but make her swear by the great oath of the gods that she will plot no further harm, for once a witch has you naked she takes your manhood. Hermes vanishes.

Circe receives him beautifully, gives him the doctored cup. He drinks and is not changed. She strikes him. Off with you to the sty. He draws his sword. She screams, drops below his arm, clasps his knees: what man are you, that the drug cannot bind you? Surely you are that Ulysses Hermes always told me would come here from Troy. Sheathe the sword. Come to my bed; let us trust each other. Ulysses: no, until you swear. She swears the great oath. He goes to her bed.

Her four servant-nymphs — daughters of the springs and the river and the sea — bath him in a great cauldron, anoint him with oil, dress him in fresh clothes, set him at a table with silver dishes; but he sits brooding, with his head bent down, refusing meat and drink. Circe asks why. I cannot eat while my comrades are still swine in your sties. She rises, takes wand and salve, opens the sty-doors, drives the swine in, anoints each on the head — the bristles fell away, the limbs grew straight, they were men again, younger and taller and handsomer than before. They weep, embrace him, embrace each other. Circe tells him to fetch his ship up onto the beach and bring all the rest of the crew.

He goes to the ship. The men receive him as calves run to their mothers when the herd comes home, lowing for them. Eurylochus alone objects: do not go to Circe's place — remember the Cyclops, remember the men Odysseus's folly killed in that cave. Ulysses considers cutting his head off and is dissuaded by the others. They all go up to the palace.

For one year they stay. Feast on meat, drink wine. After twelve months the crew take Ulysses aside: Sir, it is time. Remember your country. He agrees. That night in Circe's bed he asks her to keep her promise. She agrees — but with a condition. You must go first to the house of Hades and Proserpine, to consult the soul of the blind seer Teiresias, whose mind alone is unwithered in death. Set your sail; the North wind will bear you. Beach at the grove of Persephone where the black poplars grow, by the rock where Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus run together into Acheron. Dig a trench a cubit wide. Pour libations to the dead — honey-milk, wine, water, white meal. Pray to the powerless heads of the dead. Slaughter a black ram and a black ewe at the trench, heads toward Erebus. The shades will gather. Draw your sword and forbid them the blood until Teiresias has drunk. He will tell you your way home.

At dawn Circe veils Ulysses and herself, the men are roused, the ship is launched. But Elpenor, the youngest of the crew, no great wits and no great courage, who had slept off his wine on the palace roof, hears the shouting, jumps up forgetting where he is, falls from the roof, breaks his neck, and dies. The men do not yet know. At the shore Ulysses tells them at last: we sail not for home but for the house of Hades, to question Teiresias. They throw themselves on the ground and tear their hair. Circe slips invisible past them with the black ram and ewe and ties them by the ship — who can see a god come and go, if the god does not wish it?

Analysis

Chapter 0060 — Analysis

The triple structure: gift, catastrophe, transformation

Book 10 is built on three episodes that escalate in moral weight: Aeolus (a gift squandered by the crew's distrust), the Laestrygonians (a slaughter Ulysses cannot prevent), Circe (a transformation Ulysses must master with divine help). Each turns on a different relation between the hero and his men. With Aeolus, Ulysses has done everything right and the crew destroys it; with the Laestrygonians, geography itself is a trap and Ulysses's own caution (mooring outside) is what saves him; with Circe, the men have already failed and Ulysses must go alone. The book ends with the crew of one ship reduced — first by the loss of the other eleven at Telepylus, then by Elpenor's drunken fall — to the bare crew that will sail to the dead.

The bag of winds and the crew that opens it

The Aeolus episode is one of the cruellest small tragedies in Homer. They could see the men tending the fires on the headlands of Ithaca. The crew is suspicious that the leather bag holds private wealth; they open it; the winds blast them straight back to Aeolus. The detail of Ulysses asleep for the first time in nine days at the helm is the poem's most quietly devastating sentence. The man who could not trust the gods to sail his ship without him sleeps for one night and loses home. The episode is also the poem's first instance of crew failure: the men's destructive distrust of their captain, which will recur with Eurylochus at Circe's hall and culminate fatally in book 12 with the Cattle of the Sun. The Odyssey is in part a long lament for the men a captain cannot keep alive.

Aeolus's response to the second supplication — I cannot help a man the gods so plainly hate — is the poem's most theological line. The wind-king reads the second arrival as proof of divine disfavour. Polyphemus's curse, made in book 9, is now publicly legible to other characters. The pattern is set: from here on the gods will close doors against Ulysses; even the well-meaning ones will not openly help while Poseidon is still angry.

The Laestrygonians and the architecture of disaster

Telepylus is a single image of hospitality become geography of murder. The harbour is almost completely enclosed — perfect for unloading, impossible to escape from. The eleven captains steer in for the calm anchorage; Ulysses, for some reason, ties up outside. That hesitation saves him alone. The Laestrygonians do not appear individually — they are a city of giants who line the cliffs and crush the ships with rocks and spear the swimmers like fishes. The simile of the fishes is the Odyssey at its most savage: the men have become catch for a hunt, the human reduced to fish. The episode is over in fifty lines and the rest of the wanderings will be the journey of one ship and its surviving crew. The numbers matter: of the twelve ships that left Troy at the start of book 9, only one now remains.

Circe, the witch who becomes an ally

Circe is the most fully imagined female figure of the wanderings — more developed than Calypso, more powerful than Nausicaa, more morally ambiguous than either. She is daughter of the Sun (her brother Aeetes is the king of the Argonauts' Colchis), a goddess in her own right, a witch who turns men into beasts, the only character in the poem to recognise Ulysses by description before meeting him (Hermes always told me you would come). She holds him in her bed for a year. She gives him the instructions for the Nekyia. She is the structural mid-point of the wanderings and the figure who sends him into the underworld.

The transformation of the men into pigs is one of the poem's strangest moments. They had the heads and bristles of swine, but their minds remained as before. They know what they are. They know what they were. The Odyssey is interested in what survives transformation: under the pig-shape, the human person; under Calypso's promise, the longing for Penelope; under Ulysses's beggar-disguise in books 17–22, the king and husband. Circe's wand is the negative version of the poem's whole thesis on identity. Ulysses survives it with moly — the herb the gods give to mortals so that they may keep their human shape under the witch's wand.

The moral negotiation of the bed

Hermes's instruction — make her swear before you go to bed with her, for once a witch has you naked she takes your manhood — is the most explicit moment of sexual negotiation in Homer. The bed is dangerous; the bed is unavoidable; the bed is conducted only after the formal oath. Circe accepts the terms with respect; she will be Ulysses's lover and his ally for a year. The episode is the structural inverse of Calypso (the goddess who would not let him go) and the foreshadowing of Penelope (the wife to whom every other bed is foreign). Joyce reads Circe with care in Ulysses Episode 15 (the brothel chapter): the bed is the place where masculine identity is most at risk.

The year that vanishes

The poem treats the year at Circe's palace in a single sentence: we sat there feasting on much meat and sweet wine for the whole year. The Odyssey is intensely interested in the seven years on Calypso (which it dramatises in book 5) but lets Circe's year disappear into a line. Why? Because Circe is not the test that Calypso is. With Calypso, the question is whether Ulysses will give up nostos; with Circe, the question is only how long the crew can stand pleasure before they remember home. The year is the crew's recovery, not the hero's. Eurylochus's mutiny, Ulysses's near-decapitation of him, the year of feasting, the crew's eventual private petition — these are episodes about the men, not about Ulysses. Ulysses, in his own narrative, gives them just enough space to be remembered.

Elpenor: the named death

Elpenor is the first dead member of the crew given a name. Cyclops's six, Laestrygonians' fifty-times-eleven, all unnamed. Elpenor — young, no great wits, no great courage, drunk on the roof, fell off, broke his neck — gets a name and a foolish death. The poem will give him a small but unforgettable scene in book 11 (he is the first shade Ulysses meets in Hades, asks for burial, is buried in book 12 by Ulysses's return to Aeaea). Elpenor is the Odyssey's emblem of the throwaway death: nothing glorious, no battle, nothing earned. The contrast with the named Iliadic deaths is severe.

What to watch for

• Moly — the plant the gods give to mortals to keep their human shape under the witch's wand; the Odyssey's emblem of how identity is preserved.
• The pig-transformation: human consciousness in animal shape, the poem's negative model of identity.
• Eurylochus's mutiny: the second-in-command who would have saved them and is forced into the trap; he will die at the Cattle of the Sun in book 12.
• Elpenor's death — the throwaway named death, the cue for the underworld journey.
• Circe's instructions for the Nekyia: the only character in the poem to give a full ritual recipe for raising the dead; the foundation of every later katabasis in Western literature.
• The numerical attrition: twelve ships at start of book 9; one ship and crew at start of book 11; no crew left at start of book 12's end.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0060 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The bag of winds rhymes with the Iliad's repeated motif of divine gifts the recipient cannot keep: Achilles's immortal armour stripped by Hector in Iliad 17; the bow of Pandarus that breaks the truce in Iliad 4; Patroclus borrowing Achilles's armour in Iliad 16. The Odyssey converts the motif from battle to seafaring. The Laestrygonian destruction of eleven ships compresses into one episode the catalogue of Greek deaths Proteus listed in Odyssey 4 — Ajax the Lesser drowned, Agamemnon murdered, the wreck of the Greek fleet on the return from Troy. The destruction had been foretold by the Nostoi cycle; here Ulysses witnesses one local concentration of the wider disaster.

Circe's hospitality-inversion (a beautiful palace, a singing weaver, a charmed drink, a transformation) rhymes by contrast with Helen at Sparta in Odyssey 4 (a beautiful palace, the queen at her work, the nepenthe in the wine). Both women drug the wine; Helen's drug only suspends grief, Circe's strips humanity. The two are sisters in technique, divided by intention. Ulysses's drawing of the sword on Circe reactivates the warrior of the Iliad in a domestic-magical setting where weapons should not work — and they do. Hermes's instruction to draw the sword is the Iliadic-coded gesture imported into a non-Iliadic problem. Moly is the Odyssey's emblem of how the heroic body keeps itself intact through transformation.

Forward echoes

• The Nekyia instructions at the end of book 10 set up the entire book 11. Every later Western descent-to-the-dead is built on this passage: Aeneid 6 (Aeneas at Cumae); Dante's Inferno; Milton's Paradise Lost (with reversal — the demon ascends to the world); every later katabasis story owes the ritual trench, the libation, the blood-drink-by-the-shades to Circe's prescription here.
• Circe has the longest after-life of any minor female figure in Homer. She reappears as the witch in Argonautica 4 (Apollonius brings Jason to her for purification of murder, in a careful Odyssean homage); as Spenser's Acrasia in The Faerie Queene II; as Milton's Comus's mother (Comus 50–58 names her explicitly); as Joyce's Bella Cohen in Ulysses Episode 15; as the title character of Madeline Miller's 2018 novel Circe which retells the whole arc from Circe's perspective.
• The bag of winds has been borrowed by every later wind-magic narrative: Aeolus appears in Aeneid 1 (Juno bribes him to release the storm on Aeneas's fleet), where Virgil deliberately rewrites the Odyssey's Aeolus as a bribable wind-king under Juno's control. The bag itself becomes the model for every magical container that should not be opened: Pandora's jar (older, but read into the lineage); the Arabian Nights' bottled jinn; the wishing-bag of folktale.
• The Laestrygonian episode is rewritten by Virgil as the Polyphemus episode of Aeneid 3 (the Trojans's near-disaster with the Cyclopes), with Achaemenides the abandoned Greek as commentary on Ulysses's narrative. The geography of an enclosed harbour with the only escape narrow has become a Mediterranean topos.
• Elpenor has a longer afterlife than his thirty-second cameo suggests. He is the first named-and-buried casualty of the wandering, the figure who must be buried before peace can come; his shade meeting Ulysses at the start of book 11 is the first encounter of the Nekyia and the model for every later "unburied friend who returns" — Palinurus in Aeneid 6, Misenus also in Aeneid 6, the unburied dead of Antigone. Pound's Cantos I is a direct translation of Andreas Divus's Latin of Odyssey 11; Elpenor is the first ghost in Pound's poem.
• Eurylochus, the second-in-command who fails his test here and survives, will die at the Cattle of the Sun in book 12. The poem keeps account of crew leadership in the way the Iliad keeps account of heroic prowess.
• The year at Circe's palace is the structural mirror of the seven years at Calypso's (book 5) and of the year-and-a-half wandering of Aeneas with Dido (Aeneid 1 and 4): in each, the hero is held by a goddess-or-queen long enough that the crew (or in Aeneas's case the Trojan companions) must remind him of the mission. The pattern of three women — Calypso, Circe, Penelope — is the deep structure of Ulysses's whole adult life.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0060 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; narrator; receives Aeolus's bag, loses Aeolus's favour after the crew's blunder, escapes the Laestrygonian harbour, draws sword on Circe, beds Circe under oath, spends a year, receives the Nekyia instructions
• Circe — daughter of the Sun; turns the scouting party into swine, recognises Ulysses by Hermes's prediction, restores the men, beds him, hosts the crew for a year, instructs him to the Underworld
• Hermes — meets Ulysses in the wood as a young man with the down on his cheek, gives moly, prescribes the sword-and-bed protocol with Circe

Mentioned / off-stage

• Poseidon — "Neptune"; Aeolus's words (the gods plainly hate you) refer to him; the wind-king's reading of Polyphemus's curse
• Zeus — "Jove"; sworn by Circe in the oath that ends the negotiation
• Helios — the Sun, named as Circe's father (using Apollo cast as nearest solar deity); his cattle will doom the crew in book 12

Non-cast named figures: Aeolus son of Hippotas (the wind-king, married his six daughters to his six sons); Antiphates (the Laestrygonian king who eats the scout); the unnamed Laestrygonian princess at the spring; Eurylochus (Ulysses's second-in-command, the only scout who does not enter Circe's hall, the recurrent voice of caution); Polites (the comrade Ulysses loved best, who calls to Circe at the loom and is turned into a swine); Elpenor (the youngest of the crew, falls from Circe's roof in his sleep and dies — first named death of the wandering); the unnamed four nymphs of the springs and groves who serve in Circe's bath-chamber; Teiresias (named here for the first time as the seer Ulysses must consult); Persephone (named as queen of the dead); Pyriphlegethon, Cocytus, Acheron (the rivers of the dead).

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.