Circe was the most famous witch of Greek myth. In Homer she is the daughter of Helios, the sun, and the nymph Perse; in later tradition she becomes a goddess in her own right, sister of Aeetes the king of Colchis and Pasiphaë the mother of the Minotaur. Her island of Aeaea — located, in the Greek imagination, somewhere in the far west of the known world, off the coast of Italy — was the place where Odysseus lost a year of his homeward journey, where Jason and the Argonauts were purified of murder, and where, in one tradition, Odysseus’s forgotten son Telegonus was born and raised. The encounter of Odysseus and Circe, told in Book X of the Odyssey, is the longest sustained interaction between the hero and any woman in the epic and has been a touchstone of Western literature for nearly three thousand years.
Circe in the Odyssey
Circe appears only once in Homer, in Book X, but the encounter is the structural hinge of the second half of the poem. Odysseus, hunting a stag on the island, splits his crew in two. He leads one party to a palace of polished stone set in a clearing, where wild beasts — lions, wolves, bears — fawn on the visitors like dogs. These are men Circe has transformed, drugged with her pharmaka and touched with her wand.
When the men resist her invitation, Circe strikes them with her rod and drives them into pig-sties, shrinking them to swine, though their human minds remain. Only Eurylochus, who stayed outside, escapes to report to Odysseus. Odysseus himself sets out to rescue his men, armed with a sword, and on the way is met by the messenger god Hermes. Hermes gives him the herb moly, with a black root and a milk-white flower, “hard for mortal men to dig, but the gods can do anything.” With it, he is proof against her magic.
Circe tries the same trick on Odysseus. She strikes with her wand and bids him go join his men in the sties. But the moly defeats her, and when she draws her long blade to kill him, he lunges first, seizes her by the throat, and forces her to swear the great oath of the gods never to harm him again. The witch submits, frees the men from their pig-shape, and welcomes the Greeks to her hall.
Circe then feeds them — bread and cheese, honey and Pramnian wine mixed with her own drugs. She does not turn them into swine this time, and Odysseus spends a full year on Aeaea. When his men finally beg to leave, she releases them and gives Odysseus detailed instructions for the next stage of the journey: the passage past the Sirens, between Scylla and Charybdis, and the prohibition against eating the cattle of the sun on Thrinacia. Circe’s guidance is, in the poem’s economy, the only way Odysseus can survive the rest of his wanderings.
Circe and the Argonauts
Circe also appears in Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, in a brief but essential episode. On the return from Colchis, the Argonauts are polluted by the murder of Absyrtus (Medea’s brother, killed by Jason in the flight from Aeetes). They are told to be purified by Circe, who lives in the west. Apollonius makes clear that Circe is the sister of Aeetes and therefore the aunt of Medea, who is part of the crew and is the one most contaminated by the killing. Medea alone is purified of the blood-guilt, the Argonauts pass on, and the journey home continues.
This is the only Argonautic appearance, but it matters: it makes Circe part of the Aeetid family and ties her geographically to the western Mediterranean, somewhere out beyond the reach of ordinary Greek sailors.
Circe and the Roman Poets
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book XIV) and the Fasti, Circe acquires a long love-affair with Picus, the king of the Latins. When Picus refuses her advances, she turns him into a woodpecker, and later turns his followers into various beasts — a story that gives the Romans a place for her in their own origin-myth. Hyginus and the Aeneid also place her in Italy: in Virgil, the buried lair of Circe, in the language of the prophecy given to the Trojans, becomes a landmark of the western Mediterranean.
Telegonus and the Death of Odysseus
The most disturbing addition to the Circe story is not in Homer but in later poets. In the Telegony — a lost epic of the Epic Cycle, summarised in Proclus’ Chrestomathy and known from citations — Circe becomes the lover of Odysseus during his year on Aeaea, and the mother of his son Telegonus. When the grown Telegonus sets out in search of his father and lands on Ithaca, he does not recognise Odysseus and kills him with a poisoned spear tipped with a sting-ray barb. He then takes the body, together with Telemachus and Penelope, back to Aeaea, where Penelope and Circe are made immortal and Telegonus marries Telemachus. The story is not in Homer, and Homer’s audience would not have known it; the Odyssey itself only hints at the hero’s death. But the Telegony was the canonical sequel in the Epic Cycle, and it is the source of the awkward but persistent myth of Circe as Odysseus’s lover and the mother of his last son.
Circe in the Visual Arts
Circe is one of the most common subjects in Greek vase painting of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and the surviving corpus is large. The standard scenes are three: Circe offering the kykeon (the drug-mixed drink) to Odysseus’s men; Odysseus threatening Circe with his drawn sword; and the transformation of the men into swine, often shown in mid-change, with a man’s head on a pig’s body. The best-preserved example is the early-fifth-century cup by the Colmar Painter, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, which shows the moment Hermes gives the moly to Odysseus. Roman wall-paintings at Pompeii and a fourth-century BCE Apulian krater in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen in Munich continue the tradition.
Circe in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
In the twentieth century, the witch of Aeaea became a figure of feminist reclamation. The most important modern retelling is Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), a novel in the first person that follows Circe from her birth on the sun’s island through to the death of Odysseus and the departure of Telegonus, recasting her as a quiet, observant protagonist whose powers are tied not to malice but to knowledge of plants. The book is the basis for a forthcoming HBO adaptation. Edith Hamilton had earlier made her the title character of Circe in Mythology (1942), and Annie Dillard used her as the subject of “The Death of Circe,” a 1977 essay on the silence of women in epic. The band of the same name took the name from the witch; the spacecraft concept “Circe” appears in the Killzone and God of War franchises; and the name is so familiar that an asteroid (10199 Chariklo) was once confused in popular sources with the mythological Circe.
A Note on Reading the Myth
Circe is a useful test case for how to read the Greek sources. In Homer she is dangerous but not malevolent; in the later Epic Cycle she is a sexual partner and a murderer-by-proxy; in Apollonius she is the necessary cleanser of the Argonauts; in Ovid she is the spurned lover of a Latin king; in modern fiction she is the wise and lonely witch. None of these readings is the “true” one. They are different answers to the same question, posed by different cultures at different times. The pages that follow on Greek mythology take the same approach: each myth is told in its strongest ancient form, with the variants noted where they matter.
For the broader context, see our profile of Odysseus, the full Odyssey story, and our guide to the Greek creatures and beings.