Scylla and Charybdis are the two hazards that no Greek sailor in the western Mediterranean could avoid. Scylla, in Homer, is a six-headed sea-monster who lives in a cleft of rock, on one side of a narrow strait, and devours sailors from passing ships with each of her six heads. Charybdis, on the opposite side, is a great whirlpool that swallows the sea-water three times a day and vomits it back, and any ship that comes too close is sucked down to the bottom. The two were set on opposite sides of the strait, the ancients believed, precisely so that they could not both be avoided: pass close to one and the other is sure to claim you.
The strait in question is, in geographic terms, the Strait of Messina, the narrow passage between Sicily and the toe of Italy. It is one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the Mediterranean, with strong currents, sudden whirlpools, and a notorious rock called Scylla and a shoal called Charybdis on the modern charts. The Greek poets localised the two monsters here as early as Homer, and the identification has stuck for nearly three thousand years. “Between Scylla and Charybdis” is now a stock phrase in English for a choice between two equal evils.
Scylla in Homer
In the Odyssey, Book XII, Circe gives Odysseus detailed instructions for the passage past the two monsters. Scylla, she says, is the less avoidable: Charybdis can be dodged by keeping close to the rock, but Scylla lives in the rock itself, in a cave so high that no arrow can reach her crest. She has six long necks, and on each head a triple row of teeth, set close and full of black death. She is never visible in her entirety — only her heads, darting out of the cleft to seize sailors from the decks of passing ships.
Circe’s advice is grim and final. Fight Scylla and you will lose. “She will take six of your men, the best you have on board.” Pass her at the cost of six lives, and Charybdis is the greater danger. Odysseus, she says, will pass Scylla and lose six men; he will not pass Charybdis, but will return to her a second time, in the storm that wrecks his ship on Thrinacia. The whole passage is engineered by the poet to put the hero in a position where courage, intelligence, and piety are all required, and yet where one of his men must die no matter what he does.
When the moment comes, Odysseus follows Circe’s advice: he hugs the rock, and Scylla darts out her six heads and takes six of his best men, who call out to him by name as they are lifted, struggling, out of the ship. Odysseus cannot save them. The Odyssey has no rescue; the monster wins this round.
The Origin of Scylla
Homer does not give a parentage. Later sources, beginning with Apollodorus and Ovid, make Scylla the daughter of Phorcys and Ceto, and therefore a member of the family of sea-monsters that includes the Gorgons, the Graiae, and the dragon of the Hesperides. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book XIV) she is a beautiful nymph, the beloved of the sea-god Glaucus, who is jealous of her beauty. The jealous sorceress Circe — jealous here as elsewhere in Ovid — poisons the water in which Scylla bathes, and the nymph is transformed into the monster. From the waist up, she is a woman; from the waist down, she is surrounded by barking dogs.
This Ovidian backstory has no purchase in the Odyssey and is incompatible with Homer’s portrayal, but it became the canonical origin in later Greek thought and in the Latin poets. The story is essentially the same as Circe’s revenge on Picus (a Latin king who spurns her advances) told elsewhere in the Metamorphoses, and scholars have generally read it as Ovid’s invention, not as inherited tradition.
Charybdis in Homer
Charybdis, in the Odyssey, is simpler. She is a “she,” the daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, who lives in a fig-tree that leans over the sea. Three times a day she draws the water down, and three times she lets it up; any ship that is caught at the down-draw is sucked under. Circe, again, is the one who explains the danger, and again the warning is that no one passes the strait without losing something. Odysseus, in Book XII, successfully steers past Charybdis at the first encounter; later, on the wreckage of his ship after the storm of Zeus, he is forced to pass her a second time, and the whirlpool nearly takes him. He clings to the fig-tree over her head, hanging there until the timbers of his ship are vomited up again.
Homer does not, as some later sources do, give Charybdis a personal history. She is a phenomenon, a feature of the dangerous geography of the western sea, and the Odyssey treats her as such.
Scylla and Charybdis in the Roman and Medieval Imagination
The Latin poets, beginning with Virgil and Ovid, make Scylla a fixture of the western Mediterranean. Virgil, in the Aeneid (Book III), places both monsters in the strait between Italy and Sicily, and the Sibyl warns Aeneas of the same lesson that Circe had given Odysseus: hug the rock on Scylla’s side, and lose six men; veer toward Charybdis and the whole ship is lost. The choice, the Sibyl says, is the choice of evils: pass Scylla and survive, with losses; pass Charybdis and the whole ship goes down.
Ovid’s treatment of the two — Scylla as a transformed nymph, Charybdis as a divine monster — became the standard Roman version and was passed down through the Latin grammarians, Servius, and the school-text tradition, which is how the two monsters became the standard school-text example of Greek myth in the medieval West. Dante placed Charybdis in the eighth circle of the Inferno (Canto VII), where she is punished for her gluttony; Ariosto, in Orlando Furioso (Cantos VI and XVII), made her a recurring hazard. By the time the English poets got hold of the story, the two were a set pair, and the phrase “between Scylla and Charybdis” had become proverbial.
The Real Strait of Messina
The geography behind the myth is real. The Strait of Messina, about three kilometres across at its narrowest, runs between the Sicilian city of Messina and the Calabrian town of Villa San Giovanni. Strong currents, particularly the surface current running north and the deeper counter-current running south, produce violent turbulence, and until the construction of the modern railway ferry in the late nineteenth century, the strait was feared by sailors. The whirlpool of Charybdis has been variously identified with a real whirlpool off the Calabrian coast (the garofalo off the hamlet of Cannitello) and with the broader tidal phenomena of the strait. The rock of Scylla is the modern Scilla, a town on the Calabrian side built on a sea-cliff. The name Scylla is almost certainly pre-Greek, and the rock may have been the seat of a local sea-goddess before the Greeks arrived and identified her with their own mythology.
A Note on Reading the Myth
Scylla and Charybdis are the cleanest example on this site of how Greek myth is built on a real world. The geographical fact is a dangerous strait. The literary fact is a passage in the Odyssey that uses the strait to make a moral point about choice and its costs. The later Roman and medieval readings are interpretations of the literary fact, not additions to it. When you read the section on Scylla in the Odyssey, you are reading the earliest version, the one on which everything else is built. When you read Ovid, you are reading an Augustan poet playing with the inherited story. The two should be read in that order.
For more, see our profile of Odysseus, the Odyssey story, and the Circe page. For the cultural afterlife of the phrase “between Scylla and Charybdis,” see our guide to Greek mythology in modern culture.