(Apologoi concluding; the four episodes that empty the last ship of its crew, ending at Calypso's island where the third-person narrative of book 5 picked the hero up)

The ship returns from Hades to Circe's island. They beach, fall asleep on the strand. At dawn Ulysses sends men back to her hall for Elpenor's body; they burn it on the beach in his armour, raise the cairn on the shore as he asked, plant his oar above. Circe comes down with bread and meat and red wine, smiling: bold men — to have gone down living and returned. You will die twice when others die once. Eat now; sleep tonight; in the morning I will tell you all you need to know.

That night she takes Ulysses aside and warns him of the road. First the Sirens — two women in a flowered meadow, sweet voices, but around them is a great heap of the bones and dried skins of dead men. Stop the men's ears with wax; you yourself may listen if you wish, but have them bind you upright to the mast-step, and tighter still if you signal for release. Past the Sirens come two roads. One is the Wandering Rocks, where doves bringing ambrosia to Jove are dashed, where no ship has passed except the Argo by Hera's love for Jason. The other lies between two cliffs — on the one cliff, a cave high above the sea, in it Scylla, with twelve dangling feet and six necks, each ending in a head with three rows of teeth; she barks like a young dog; she snatches passing sailors out of every ship that goes by. Below the other cliff is a fig-tree, and beneath the fig-tree Charybdis, who thrice a day sucks down the black sea-water and thrice spews it up. Do not try to fight Scylla — she is an immortal evil, deathless and hard; do not even put on armour; row hard past her cliff and lose six men rather than the whole ship. Pray as you pass to her mother Crataeis that she will not loose Scylla a second time.

Then Thrinacia: the island of the Sun, where Helios's seven herds of fifty cattle and seven flocks of fifty sheep graze, tended by his daughters Phaethusa and Lampetie; they do not breed and do not die. If you and your men leave them be, you will reach Ithaca though in evil case. If you harm them, I foretell the destruction of your ship and your crew, and you yourself, if you live, will come home late, alone, in another's ship, to find sorrow in your house.

At dawn Circe sends the wind. The ship runs. Ulysses tells the crew everything — except about Scylla, because if they had known they would have stopped rowing and clutched the keel in the hold. He kneads a great loaf of beeswax into discs in the sun, plugs every man's ears. Two men bind him standing to the mast-foot; his hands behind, the cords tight. The Sirens spy the ship and begin: come, glorious Ulysses, great glory of the Achaeans, come bring your ship to land and hear our two voices. No man has ever rowed past in his black ship without first listening — for we know all that the Argives and Trojans suffered at Troy in the will of the gods, and we know all that comes to pass on the bountiful earth. He flings his head against the bonds, frowns to the men to release him; Eurylochus and Perimedes get up and tie the cords still tighter. The ship runs past. When the song fails behind, the men pull out the wax.

The roar of Scylla's strait reaches them across the water. The men drop their oars in terror; the ship loses way. Ulysses goes down the benches with the rallying speech: friends, we have been in worse than this; remember the Cyclops; trust me again. He says nothing about Scylla. He himself, against Circe's instructions, puts on his armour and takes two long spears, and goes to stand in the bow watching the cliff. Charybdis on the left vomits like a cauldron seething over a great fire, the spray flying up to the rocks above; the rowers fix their eyes on her. Ulysses watches the cliff to the right. He cannot see Scylla. She drops from the cave with her six necks like a great fisherman with his rod and ox-horn hooks who throws the bait, drops the bull-horn down, hauls the fish gasping up onto the dry land — and she snatches up six of his best men, six in her six mouths, six at one moment, and they were lifted up the cliff still calling my name in the agony of their dying — the most pitiable sight in all my voyaging.

The remaining crew row out of the strait and the day fades. Ahead lies Thrinacia. From sea they can hear the lowing of the herds and the bleating of the sheep. Ulysses repeats Teiresias's prophecy from the Nekyia: we must avoid this island, the worst evil waits for us here. Eurylochus answers angrily — you are made of iron, you have no pity for men exhausted with rowing; we will sleep one night on the beach and at dawn we will sail. The crew sides with him. Ulysses extracts an oath: swear that you will not lay hands on a single beast of the Sun while we are on this shore. They swear. They camp; they cook the supper from what's left of Circe's stores; they sleep.

That night a south wind rises, and at dawn the wind has not abated. For a whole month the south wind holds. The food runs out. The crew fishes and traps birds with curved hooks and pieces of meat from their belts, and they grow hollow with hunger. One day Ulysses goes inland to wash his hands and pray. The gods send sleep on him. While he is asleep Eurylochus rises and speaks to the men: listen — all deaths are bad, but starving is the worst. Let us drive in the best of the Sun's cattle and sacrifice them. We will swear to build him a temple at home; or if he angers and wrecks us, I had rather drown choking on the sea than die little by little here. They agree. They drive in the cattle, cut their throats — having no barley for the meal-cake they pluck oak-leaves, having no wine for the libation they pour water. They wrap the thigh-pieces in fat, burn them, taste the entrails, cut the rest into smaller pieces, spit-roast and eat.

Ulysses wakes, smells the burning fat as he comes back along the path, and groans aloud to the gods. Father Jove and you blessed others, you have ruined me by laying sleep on me while these madmen did this thing. On the island Lampetie the Sun's daughter goes to her father at once. Hyperion the Sun goes to Jove in a fury: Father Jove, punish the men of Ulysses. They have killed the cattle that were my joy when I rose in the morning and my joy when I went down at evening. If you do not give me satisfaction I will go down to Hades and shine among the dead. Jove answers: go on shining for the gods and the bread-eating men; I will smash their ship with a white thunderbolt on the wine-dark sea.

For six days the men feast on the cattle. The hides crawl on the ground; the meat — raw or roasted on the spits — bellows like cattle. On the seventh day the south wind drops; they board the ship and put to sea. The moment the land falls behind them Jove spreads a black cloud over the ship and the sea grows dark beneath it. A west wind hits in a great squall; the forestay-cables snap; the mast falls aft, crushing the helmsman's skull so that he tumbled overboard like a diver, all his life out of him at once; lightning strikes the ship and fills it with the smell of sulphur; the men are pitched into the sea around the wreck and they bobbed about like sea-gulls on the waves and the god denied them their homecoming. One by one they drown. Ulysses alone, going from beam to beam as the squall splits the planks, takes the long oxhide back-stay still tied between the broken mast and the floating keel, lashes the two together with it, sits astride them, and lets the wind take him.

The wind shifts to the south for the rest of the night and drives him back the way he came, straight to Charybdis. At dawn the whirlpool is sucking down the salt sea. He lets the mast and keel go in the suck of her, leaps for the great fig-tree that overhangs the cliff, and hangs there clinging like a bat with no foothold among the high branches and no way down; the roots run too deep, the boughs too high. He waits. No juryman, kept in court all day by tedious cases, was ever so glad of the dinner hour as I was to see my keel and mast come spat up out of her again. He drops down upon them, paddles with his hands. Jove takes pity and keeps Scylla looking the other way — for otherwise I had not escaped sheer destruction.

Nine days he drifts. On the tenth night the gods cast him up on Ogygia, the island of Calypso, who took me in and made me much of and would have made me immortal — but you have heard all of this already last night from me, you and your noble queen, and I will not say the same things over again. Here the Apologoi end.

Analysis

Chapter 0062 — Analysis

The book that empties the ship

Book 12 is the book that ends the wandering by emptying the ship. At the start, Ulysses has the survivors of the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, and the long stay at Circe's — perhaps forty men. At the end he is alone on the keel of his wrecked ship drifting toward Calypso. Four episodes — the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Thrinacia, the storm — and the crew is gone. The Odyssey's wanderings are a long subtraction: twelve ships at start of book 9, one ship at start of book 10, no ship and no crew by end of book 12. The arrival at Calypso's island as a sole survivor is the precondition for the whole frame of book 5 onward. The Odyssey has now told us how Ulysses came to be the man Hermes finds weeping on her beach.

The Sirens as test of curiosity

The Sirens are the most famous brief episode in the poem. They occupy fewer than fifty lines and they have shaped the European imagination of dangerous beauty more than almost any other passage in literature. Circe's instruction is precise: wax for the men, ropes for the captain — and the captain alone may listen. What the Sirens sing is not music in general but Ulysses's own past. We know all that the Argives and Trojans suffered at Troy in the will of the gods. They offer to sing the Iliad to its surviving hero. The temptation is to hear his own life from outside, as a poem already complete, as the dead heroes whose stories he just heard in the Nekyia. The bones around the meadow are the corpses of the men who could not bear to leave when the song stopped. The Odyssey understands that the deepest temptation is to become permanently the audience of one's own life.

Kafka famously suggested in The Silence of the Sirens that the Sirens may have an even more terrible weapon than song — silence — and that Ulysses may have escaped by misreading the threat. Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with this episode read as the first scene of class: the master listens; the workers, ears stopped, row. The poem itself does not theorise; it shows the rope tightening at the captain's signal, and the men rowing past.

Scylla and Charybdis as a model of forced choice

The strait is the Odyssey's most concentrated single image of moral arithmetic. Two evils; one path; one cannot be avoided without choosing the other. Circe's advice is brutal: lose six men rather than the whole ship. Ulysses chooses Scylla and watches six of his best men hauled up the cliff by their own names. The simile of the fisherman with the ox-horn hook is one of the most disturbing in the poem — domestic fishing-image used for cannibal monster, the men becoming the catch that some shoreside angler hooks for a quiet day. Skylla and Kharybdis have become proverbial — between Scylla and Charybdis — for any forced choice between disasters; the phrase is in every European language by the medieval period.

The detail that Ulysses defies Circe by putting on his armour and going to the bow with spears is small but telling. He cannot help fighting; his instinct is Iliadic; he must do something. The fight is futile — Scylla's heads come down out of reach of any spear — and the lesson is that some monsters cannot be fought, only counted. He loses the six men anyway.

Thrinacia and the Cattle of the Sun

The Thrinacia episode is the Odyssey's structural complement to the Cyclops. The Cyclops broke the law of hospitality and was punished by Ulysses; the men of Ulysses break the prohibition of the gods and are punished by Helios and Zeus. The two episodes mirror each other across the wanderings: book 9 is kreon (meat-eating, the Cyclops eating the men); book 12 is kreon again (the men eating the cattle of the Sun). The verb is the same, the moral weighting reversed. The men's defence in Eurylochus's speech — all deaths are bad, but starving is the worst — is humanly persuasive and theologically catastrophic. The crew chooses one death over another. The cattle's hides crawl on the ground; the spitted meat lows. The signs are unmistakable. They eat anyway.

The Cattle of the Sun as the Iliad's question in reverse

The Cyclops and the Cattle of the Sun frame the whole crew problem of the Odyssey. The Cyclops episode showed the men who saved themselves through Ulysses's cunning and then ruined it by his hubris; the Cattle episode shows the men who ruined themselves through their own hunger while Ulysses was asleep. The poem is asking what kind of crew a hero can hope to keep alive, and the answer is none. The Odyssey is in part a long lament for a crew that cannot be commanded out of its appetites. The Iliad asked what makes a man choose death-for-glory; the Odyssey asks what makes a man choose death-for-meat.

The storm and the survival on the keel

The storm is one of the most efficiently brutal passages in Homer. The mast snaps; the helmsman is killed by the falling spar like a diver tumbling overboard; the lightning fills the wreck with the smell of sulphur; the men bob like sea-gulls on the wave-tops and the god denied them their homecoming. The sea-gull simile is the Odyssey's most poignant single image of small life on big water: men become birds, briefly, before they drown. The survival of Ulysses on the lashed mast-and-keel, the return to Charybdis, the leap for the fig-tree, the hanging like a bat while the whirlpool sucks down his life-raft and at last spews it back up — all this is the Odyssey at its most physical. Butler's prose is exactly right for the hands-and-feet engineering of survival.

The Argo as the Odyssey's only acknowledgement of another tradition

Circe's mention of the Argo — the only ship that ever passed the Wandering Rocks, and that only because Hera loved Jason — is the Odyssey's single explicit acknowledgement that another heroic tradition exists. The Argonautic saga predates the Trojan saga in mythic chronology (the Argonauts are the fathers and grandfathers of the heroes at Troy) but is told in fewer surviving texts; Apollonius's Argonautica in the third century BCE will be the first to give it monumental form. The Odyssey here nods at the older voyage as a precursor and a contrast: Jason got through the impossible passage by divine love alone; Ulysses must choose between two specific evils and pay the price in named men.

The Apologoi close

The book ends with one of the most charming small refusals in literature. Ulysses, having narrated almost continuously for four books, breaks off when he reaches Calypso: you already heard all of this from me last night, you and your noble queen, and I will not tell the same things twice. The poem winks at its own structure — book 5 narrated by the poet, book 7 narrated by Ulysses to Arete in compressed form, now refused at book 12 — and turns the page on the Apologoi. Book 13 will see him aboard the Phaeacian ship that takes him home.

What to watch for

• The Sirens as the temptation to become permanent audience of one's own story.
• Scylla and Charybdis as the model of forced choice; the fisherman-simile.
• The Cattle of the Sun as moral counterweight to the Cyclops episode — meat-eating reciprocated and avenged.
• Eurylochus as the leader-from-below whose persuasion ends the crew; he drowns with them in the storm.
• The Argo's brief appearance as the Odyssey's only nod to the older Argonautic tradition.
• The sea-gull simile in the storm — small life on big water.
• The fig-tree at Charybdis as the second life-saving plant after moly — the Odyssey's botanical recurrences.
• The closing refusal to retell Calypso — the poem's wink at its own narrative.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0062 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

Book 12 finishes the long subtraction of Ulysses's crew that began with the Cicones at Ismarus in book 9. The Thrinacian cattle-eating is the structural mirror of the Cyclops's man-eating in book 9: the verb of consuming is the same, the moral weighting is reversed, and the two episodes frame the wanderings as a single act of moral arithmetic. The Cattle of the Sun also satisfies the prophecy Teiresias gave in the Nekyia at book 11 and the warning Circe gave at the start of this book — three voices in agreement, the crew choosing against all of them, the punishment as prescribed. The fig-tree at Charybdis rhymes with the bed of leaves at the river-mouth (book 5) and the olive thicket (book 5) and the moly-plant (book 10): a small flora that saves Ulysses by being there at the moment of greatest need; the Odyssey's interest in named plants is consistent and theological.

The brief mention of the Argo and Jason is the only explicit cross-tradition reference in Homer. The Argonauts are the older heroic generation; the Wandering Rocks are their landscape; the Odyssey borrows the geography but keeps Ulysses on the other route through Scylla. The acknowledgement is small but it positions the Odyssey within a wider mythic geography it could choose not to acknowledge at all.

Forward echoes

• The Sirens are one of the most-rewritten passages in Western literature. Cicero, Plato, Plutarch, Boethius all read them as the temptation of false philosophy. Apollonius's Argonautica puts Orpheus aboard the Argo to outsing them. Lemprière's Classical Dictionary hands them down to the eighteenth century as figures of erotic peril, and Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite painting (Waterhouse, Draper) takes them up as Victorian sex-monsters. Kafka's Schweigen der Sirenen (1917) inverts the danger by giving them silence as the deeper weapon. Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) opens with the Sirens episode read as the first scene of class — the master listens, the workers row.
• Scylla and Charybdis as forced choice has become one of the deepest metaphors in the European languages — the phrase is in every European tongue, the proverbial use unbroken from the medieval to the present. Erasmus collects it in his Adagia (1500); Shakespeare uses it in Merchant of Venice III.5; "between a rock and a hard place" is a North American idiomatic re-translation. Joyce uses Scylla and Charybdis as the title of Ulysses Episode 9 (Stephen on Shakespeare in the National Library, the strait between Aristotle and Plato).
• The Cattle of the Sun is the theme set by the poem's very first lines (they perished by their own follies, fools, who ate the cattle of the Sun-god — Hyperion took their day of homecoming from them). The whole Odyssey is in some sense the long retrospective unfolding of that prologue's summary. The episode is the model for every later "broken sacred taboo destroys the company" narrative — the apple in Paradise Lost, the albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Coleridge cites Homer directly), the fruit in countless folktales.
• The Argo's brief cameo is the seed Apollonius will grow into the four-book Argonautica (c.250 BCE) — the longest mythological epic between Homer and Virgil, and the formal model for Virgil's Aeneid. Apollonius reads Circe's mention of the Wandering Rocks as a structural invitation to fill in the older voyage.
• The Sun's threat to shine in Hades is one of the strangest theological details in Homer and is taken up rarely in classical reception but reactivated in Milton (the sun threatening to leave the world is the trope of Lycidas) and in modern poetry (Stevens's The Sun This March).
• The closing refusal to retell Calypso is the model for every later epic's self-aware narrative pivot — Virgil at the start of Aeneid 4, Tasso at the start of every canto, Milton's repeated invocations.
• The Storm and the survival on the keel are the explicit model for Aeneid 1's storm: Juno bribes Aeolus, the storm hits Aeneas's fleet, the men cling to the rocks like sea-birds, the survivors come ashore alone. Virgil rewrites the technical detail with deliberate Odyssean precision.
• The bridge to Calypso brings the Apologoi back to the moment in book 5 where the poem first showed Ulysses weeping on the beach. The four-book inset narrative is now closed and the action returns to the third-person poem's continuous chronology.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0062 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; narrator; buries Elpenor, hears Circe's briefing, listens to the Sirens bound to the mast, takes the strait, watches six men taken by Scylla, sleeps through the cattle-slaughter, survives the storm alone, hangs in the fig-tree at Charybdis, drifts nine days to Calypso
• Circe — comes to the beach at dawn with food, briefs Ulysses on the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Thrinacia; her last appearance in the poem

Mentioned / off-stage

• Zeus — "Jove"; agrees to the Sun's request for vengeance; spreads the black cloud; smashes the ship with the thunderbolt; keeps Scylla looking the wrong way at the second passage
• Poseidon — implicit throughout (the Cyclops's curse still operative)
• Helios — "Hyperion the Sun"; threatens to shine in Hades if his cattle are not avenged
• Hera — "Juno"; named as the one who piloted the Argo past the Wandering Rocks for love of Jason

Non-cast named figures: Elpenor (his body burned, his cairn raised, his oar planted on the shore — closing the loop opened in book 10); Eurylochus (delivers the mutiny speech that leads to the cattle-slaughter; drowns with the others); Perimedes (helps bind Ulysses tighter at the Sirens); the Sirens (the two singing women in the meadow of bones); Scylla (the six-headed cliff-cave monster, daughter of Crataeis); Charybdis (the whirlpool under the fig-tree, thrice daily sucking and spewing); Crataeis (Scylla's mother, to be prayed to in passing); the Wandering Rocks (the alternative route); the Argo and Jason (the only ship to have passed them); Phaethusa and Lampetie (the Sun's daughters, herders of the cattle on Thrinacia); the unnamed helmsman (killed by the falling mast in the storm); Calypso (the destination of the nine-day drift; the bridge back into book 5's third-person narrative).

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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.