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Beware the blood!

Ody: Flashbacks to Polites

The Greek myth of Scylla and its connection with Southern Italy's Calabria

In Greek mythology, Scylla is a legendary, man-eating monster who lives on one side of a narrow channel of water, opposite her counterpart, the sea-swallowing monster Charybdis. The two sides of the strait are within an arrow's range of each other—so close that sailors attempting to avoid the whirlpools of Charybdis would pass dangerously close to Scylla and vice versa.

The idiom "between Scylla and Charybdis" has come to mean being forced to choose between two similarly undesirable or risky outcomes".

Scylla is first attested in Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus and his crew encounter her and Charybdis on their travels. Later myth provides an origin story as a beautiful nymph who gets turned into a monster.

Book Three of Virgil's Aeneid associates the strait where Scylla dwells with the Strait of Messina between Calabria, a region of Southern Italy, and the island of Sicily. The coastal town of Scilla in Calabria takes its name from the mythological figure of Scylla and it is said to be the home of the nymph.

According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, the fisherman-turned-sea god Glaucus falls in love with the beautiful Scylla, but she is repulsed by his piscine form and flees to a promontory where he cannot follow. When Glaucus goes to Circe to request a love potion that will win Scylla's affections, the enchantress herself becomes enamored with him. Meeting with no success, Circe becomes hatefully jealous of her rival and therefore prepares a vial of poison and pours it into the sea pool where Scylla regularly bathed, transforming her into a thing of terror even to herself.

Scylla became a sea monster, a woman from the waist up. From the bottom down, she had twelve feet and six heads on long snaky necks, each head having a triple row of sharklike teeth, while her loins were girdled by the heads of baying dogs. From her lair in a cave she devoured whatever ventured within reach, including six of Odysseus’s companions.

Meanwhile, Charybdis was a different kind of monster. She was the daughter of the god Poseidon and the goddess Gaia, and lived on a rock near Messina, off the coast of Sicily.

According to many versions of the myth, Heracles passed the rock where Charybdis lived. Heracles had with him the cattle he'd stolen from Geryon (as part of the twelve labours Heracles had to complete). Charybdis stole some of them and wolfed them down. Zeus punished her for this act of theft by smiting her with a thunderbolt; Charybdis fell into the sea and became a monster. She drank in the surrounding sea water and anything found floating in it, which occasionally included passing ships.

Ships had to navigate between these two dangerous forces when travelling through this part of the Mediterranean sea, and thus the common phrase 'to be between Scylla and Charybdis' or 'steering between Scylla and Charybdis' was born, meaning to navigate between two equally destructive courses of action, or, to use another idiom, to be 'between a rock and a hard place'.

Scylla was the ancients' rational explanation for a notorious rock shoal located on the Calabrian side of the Strait of Messina: the sharp rocks become the dogs' teeth that could snag passing sailors and boats. Meanwhile, Charybdis was their way of explaining the strong sea currents found off the coast of Sicily (which are, in reality, nowhere near as powerful as the whirlpool of myth). Scylla and Charybdis were close enough to each other to present a real threat to passing ships, and it was impossible to avoid them both.

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If you want to learn what Julian teaches in his classes, read Poetics by Aristotle. It’s not as hard to read as it looks, and you don’t need much pre-knowledge in philosophy to understand it, just need to know a little bit about greek tragedies (Oedipus Rex and Antigone by Sophocle, Odissey and Illiad by Homer are good ways to start). Reading it will make you feel you’re a part of the classics murderer friends group.