Chapter summary
Odysseus continues the account he gives the Phaeacians in Alcinous's hall. The ship leaves the stream of Oceanus and reaches the island of Aeaea, where the house of Dawn and the place where the Sun rises are. The next morning, Odysseus sends the comrades to the house of Circe to fetch the body of Elpenor, the dead comrade. They cut wood on the highest point of the shore, weep, burn the body with his armor, raise a mound with a stele, and fix the dead man's oar on top. Circe, who realized they had come back from Hades, arrives quickly with her maidservants, carrying bread, meat, and red wine, and calls them "twice mortal," because other men die only once. She tells them to eat and drink all day and to set sail at dawn: she will show them the way and explain each thing, so that they do not suffer some harmful error at sea or on land. They obey. At night, when the comrades sleep beside the ship's cables, Circe takes Odysseus by the hand, seats him apart from them, and questions him; he tells everything, and she says that this is already accomplished and that now he must hear what comes next, because a god will make him remember.
Circe begins with the Sirens, who enchant with their song every man who comes near: whoever hears them out of ignorance is never again welcomed home by wife and children, and there are men's bones rotting in the meadow where they sit. She tells him to pass them by and to smear wax in his companions' ears; if he himself wants to listen, let them tie him hand and foot, standing upright by the mast, and if he begs them to untie him, let them bind him with even more cords. Then she says she will not indicate which course to take, that he must decide himself, and she describes the two. On one side are the Wandering Rocks, which only the ship Argo ever passed, and only because Hera loved Jason. On the other, a smooth rock rises to the clouds, with a cave where Scylla lives, who has twelve feet, six necks, and three rows of teeth in each head and snatches a man from the ship with each head; near her, a lower rock with a fig tree, beneath which Charybdis swallows and spits up dark water three times a day, and not even Poseidon, the earth-shaker, could save him there. Circe advises passing close to Scylla, because it is much better to lose six companions than all of them. Odysseus asks whether he could escape Charybdis and defend himself against Scylla when she attacks his men; Circe rebukes him: Scylla is an immortal evil, she cannot be fought, the best thing is to flee and to invoke Crataeis, her mother, who will keep her from attacking again.
Finally Circe speaks of the island of Thrinacia, where the cattle and sheep of the Sun (Helios) graze, seven herds of each kind, fifty head in each, which never breed or die, guarded by the nymphs Phaethusa and Lampetia, daughters of the Sun. If Odysseus leaves them unharmed and thinks of the return, they will reach Ithaca, though suffering; if they harm them, she foresees the ruin of the ship and the comrades, and he himself, if he escapes, will return late, wretched, and with no one. Dawn comes, and Circe withdraws through the island. Odysseus orders the comrades to board, and Circe sends them a favorable wind from astern. With a heavy heart, he tells the men that it is not right for only one or two to know what the goddess told him: he wants to tell everything, so that they die or escape knowing. He repeats what she ordered about the Sirens and asks them to tie him tightly to the mast and, if he orders them to untie him, to tighten the bonds even more.
The wind suddenly drops, a calm comes, and a god lulls the waves to sleep. The comrades take in the sail and sit at the oars. Odysseus cuts a large disk of wax with the bronze, kneads it until soft, and smears it in everyone's ears; they tie him to the mast, upright. When the ship comes within reach of the voice, the Sirens see it passing and sing: they call him by name, say that no one has passed there without listening to them, and that whoever hears them leaves knowing more, for they know everything the Argives and Trojans suffered at Troy and everything that happens on earth. Odysseus's heart wants to listen; he signals with his eyebrows for them to untie him, but the comrades keep rowing, and Perimedes and Eurylochus stand up to tighten the cords. When they can no longer hear the song, they remove the wax and untie him.
Soon after, Odysseus sees smoke and a great wave and hears a roar. The comrades, terrified, let their oars fall, and the ship stops. He walks the deck encouraging them one by one: they have already been through worse, the Cyclops, and escaped by his courage, counsel, and intelligence; he orders the rowers to beat the sea hard and tells the helmsman to keep the ship out of the smoke and the wave and close to the rock, so that it does not veer to the other side without his noticing. About Scylla he says nothing, so that fear does not make the men drop their oars and hide in the bottom of the ship. He himself forgets Circe's order not to arm himself, puts on his armor, takes two spears, and climbs to the prow, from where he expected to see Scylla appear first, but he does not see her and wears out his eyes searching the rock. They enter the strait weeping, with Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the other, which spits up water like a cauldron over fire and swallows it, showing the dark sandy bottom. While everyone looks at Charybdis in fear, Scylla snatches six companions from the ship, the strongest of arm. Odysseus sees them high up, their feet and hands thrashing, calling out to him by name for the last time. Scylla eats them at the mouth of the cave while they stretch out their hands to him, and he says it was the most pitiful sight he saw in all his travels.
Past the rocks, they reach the island of the Sun and, while still at sea, hear the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep. Odysseus recalls what the blind Tiresias, seer of Thebes, and Circe of Aeaea had said, and tells the men that the worst of evils awaits them there and that they must pass by. The men lose heart, and Eurylochus answers harshly: Odysseus seems made of iron, he never tires; the comrades are exhausted and want to land and prepare a supper, not wander the whole night at sea, when the winds blow dangerously and destroy ships even against the will of the gods. The others approve. Odysseus understands that a god is plotting evil and yields: he makes everyone swear that no one, out of folly, will kill an ox or a sheep, and that they will eat only what Circe gave them. They swear, anchor in a harbor beside fresh water, dine, mourn the six who were lost, and fall asleep. In the third watch of the night, Zeus raises a storm that covers land and sea. In the morning they haul the ship into a cave, and Odysseus calls an assembly: there is still food and drink on the ship, the cows must be spared, for they belong to a terrible god, the Sun, who sees and hears all. They agree.
For a month the south wind blows without pause, and no other comes, only the east and the south. While they have bread and wine, the men do not touch the cattle, because they want to live; when what was on the ship runs out, they go hunting birds and fish with hooks, and hunger wears them down. One day Odysseus walks away across the island, washes his hands in a place sheltered from the wind, and prays to all the gods of Olympus to show him the way home; they pour sleep over his eyelids. Eurylochus then begins with bad counsel: every death is hateful, but dying of hunger is the most pitiful; let them take the finest cattle of the Sun and sacrifice them to the gods; if they reach Ithaca, they will build a temple to the Sun; and if the god grows angry and destroys the ship with the help of the other gods, he would rather die at once in the waves than waste away on a deserted island. The others approve, take the finest cows, which were grazing nearby, sacrifice them with oak leaves in place of white barley, make the libations with water and not with wine, and roast the pieces. Odysseus wakes, returns to the ship, and smells the burning fat. He shouts at the gods that cruel sleep has ruined him and that his comrades committed a great crime in his absence.
Lampetia carries the news to the Sun, who, enraged, asks the gods to punish Odysseus's comrades; if there is no adequate compensation, he will go down to Hades and shine among the dead. Zeus orders him to keep shining for immortals and mortals and promises to shatter the ship with his thunderbolt. Odysseus says he learned of this later from Calypso, who had heard it from Hermes. When he reaches the shore, he rebukes the men one by one, but there is no remedy: the cattle are dead. The gods send portents: the hides crawl, and the meat on the spits lows, roasted or raw, with the voice of cattle. For six days the comrades feast on the finest cows; on the seventh, Zeus stills the wind, and they sail. When no land is in sight, only sky and sea, Zeus places a dark cloud over the ship. The West Wind falls on them in a storm, snaps the ropes of the mast, the mast collapses and crushes the helmsman's head, and he falls from the deck like a diver. Zeus hurls his thunderbolt at the ship, which fills with sulfur; the men are thrown into the water and float like gulls around the hull, and the god takes away their return. Odysseus runs along the ship until the surge loosens the hull from the keel; he binds the mast and the keel together with a leather thong of oxhide and sits upon them. The West Wind dies down, the South Wind comes and carries him back to Charybdis. At dawn, he leaps and grabs the fig tree, hanging like a bat, with no footing, and waits for Charybdis to spit back the mast and keel; they come late, at the hour when the judge leaves the assembly for supper. He lets go, drops into the strait beside the pieces, sits upon them, and rows with his hands; Zeus does not allow Scylla to see him. After nine days adrift, on the tenth night, the gods bring him to the island of Ogygia, where Calypso lives. He breaks off the account there: he told all this yesterday to Alcinous and his wife, and it is hateful to him to repeat what has already been made clear.
Analysis
The book sets three trials in sequence, and each asks something different of Odysseus. Before the Sirens, he obeys Circe to the letter and lets himself be bound because of what he is capable of wanting; before Scylla, he disobeys and hides the danger because of what men are capable of feeling; before the cattle of the Sun, he informs, makes them swear, and sees the oath broken at the moment he sleeps. The three trials concern command and knowledge, and the last explains the proem of the poem: the comrades die, as the narrator says at the very beginning, through their own folly.
Odysseus himself tells all of this before the Phaeacians, and he spares himself nothing: he says he hid the danger of Scylla, that he forgot Circe's order, and that sleep came over him while the men were deciding. The word atasthalíai, folly, which the proem applies to the comrades, appears here on his own lips, in the request for the oath (12.300): he names the risk before it happens. Two facts remain in tension without the poem resolving them: the month-long hunger was real, and the cattle belonged to a god.
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