The Univira

      Feel free to turn on “White Flag” for this post; I’m certainly going to town with it.

      Dido is immediately noteworthy as a female ruler in a culture that didn’t terribly encourage female rulers. She was born a Phoenician princess and by the best historical accounts (which, let’s make clear right from the beginning, are all reported fourth-hand by Greeks--it’s a great tragedy, at least in my view, that Dido actually lived within a historical period in a society with a fastidious record-keeping tradition, but most of the records happen to have been destroyed) was made co-ruler with her brother when her father died. Nevertheless, a power struggle ensued between Dido and her brother, and in consequence her husband was murdered. She was forced out of power in her home kingdom and embarked on a mission to found her own city, which she accomplished successfully. (And how many ancient Mediterranean cities name a woman as their founder?) Carthage, her new city in North Africa (Qart-hadasht is Phoenician for “New Town”),  went on to become an important state in the Mediterranean and menaced Rome for several centuries until it was crushed, decimated, and repopulated by Roman settlers. Throughout Carthaginian history, Dido was honored as the founder and was depicted on Carthaginian coins like an old-world George Washington.

      Dido is famous from the Aeneid, and that’s a shame. Women in the Aeneid overall have a bad reputation. Vergil’s female characters tend to personify chaos, irrationality, selfishness, vindictiveness, and resistance to the grand plans of patriarchal benevolence as represented by Jupiter and Aeneas. (These traits are applied to Vergil’s female characters as a substitute for personality; the only exception is Lavinia, who as substitute for personality has…nothing. Although I hear she might be more interesting in Ursula K. Leguin’s novel.) So it’s unfortunate that the vast majority of people who hear about Dido hear about her from Vergil, in whose epic she is depicted as above all romantically obsessed with the hero. Even though she is, before Aeneas arrives, the competent queen of Carthage whose priorities center on her people’s needs, once she meets Aeneas she quickly falls in love with him and things go downhill. Her romance with Aeneas spirals out of control until she is neglecting the needs of the state in favor of her love life. When Aeneas attempts to leave in pursuit of his original mission, Dido tries to detain him, but her efforts fail, Aeneas departs, and she rages through the streets. Finally, driven insane by grief and frustrated love, she commits suicide. The narrative arc follows her overall loss of dignity and competence as she, in her feminine weakness, succumbs to the allure of romance.

      As I say, it’s a shame that when people hear about Dido, this is the Dido they hear about, because this is not the only version of the story recorded. When Vergil wrote the Aeneid around existing legendary characters--Aeneas, the Trojan colonist who settled near Rome, and Dido, the Phoenician colonist who settled in north Africa centuries later--he did some serious reinventing of the characters. Although Varro depicted Aeneas meeting Dido and her sister, we have no evidence that anyone prior to Vergil depicted Dido as falling in love with Aeneas. In fact, pre-Vergilian legend depicted Dido as being unwaveringly loyal to her first husband (the one her brother killed), and unwilling to remarry for any reason. (I wish I could cite a good source for this legend, but again, all the references we have to this story from antiquity seem to be quoted third-hand out of Greek compilations of Phoenician compilations. You can try looking Dido up in Timaeus or Justin, but I doubt you’ll find all the information you want; I certainly didn’t.) In this version, Aeneas never enters the story. Dido is so devoted to her late husband that she has vowed never to remarry. Nevertheless, a local African king wishes to marry her, and presents a generous offer to her magistrates that would greatly benefit the Carthaginian state. The magistrates know that Dido will never accept remarriage, so they lay a trap for her: they outline the benefits that the king proposes to provide, mention that he has stipulated as a condition of these benefits that a Carthaginian must live with him to teach him about Carthaginian culture, and they theatrically despair of finding anyone willing to leave Carthage to perform this service. Dido objects that any patriotic Carthaginian ought to be happy to provide such a benefit to the state--at which point the magistrates reveal that the king has requested Dido specifically, as his wife. Trapped by her words, but still unwilling to remarry, she commits suicide rather than betray her vow.

      Here there is no romantic obsession with a traveling hero, no consuming feminine weakness that aggressively corrodes her ability to rule. Her tragic flaw is her integrity, and her devotion to her husband even when it conflicts with the interests of her state. We can still debate whether it was healthy that she was so bound up in her identity as her husband’s wife that she would prefer to commit suicide than remarry, or whether a good ruler ought to accept a political marriage that benefits the state even when it is unappealing to the ruler personally, but in any case the pre-Vergilian picture of Dido is very different from and more respectable than the suicidal nymphomaniac Vergil shows us. In fact, Dido was held up as the paragon of the univira, a woman who only married once and demonstrated devotion to her husband, the kind of woman men wanted to marry and women were encouraged to emulate. (Talk about the Paragon of Fidelity!) In Vergil’s Dido there is little virtue that any ancient people would have held up for emulation.

      And in this you can see the mythological tradition in action. Post-Vergil, people could talk about Dido, but they had to be clear about which Dido they were talking about, because the one identity had been split into two ideas, the Vergilian or the non-Vergilian. Do you mean crazy Dido or virtuous Dido? Unfortunately, Vergil’s account was so dramatic and influential (and played so well into existing stereotypes of women as incompetent rulers) that subsequent accounts of Dido tend to be based on it: Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas or Marlowe’s play Dido, Queen of Carthage, for example. In these, Dido is an archetypal tragic figure, wretchedly in love with Aeneas and lamenting how he abandoned her. Nevertheless, the tradition of Dido as virtuous and honorable stays alive in Servius’ works and Boccaccio’s de Mulieribus Claris. The refashioning of an old archetypal character (a widowed queen) in order to discuss an idea that a new mythmaker finds relevant (empowered women cause chaos) is a classic way to develop ideas through myth, and it is typical for mythical characters to absorb new meanings and acquire polyvalence as their cultural life goes on. Dido’s cultural life--like Sappho’s, and like those of many legendary women--has exemplified a strong dichotomy between her “good” aspect and her “evil” aspect, and although her “evil” aspect tends to be better known, I at least would like to see her “good” aspect remembered.

Scheduling

This week's post has been delayed due to Memorial Day. It should be up within 24 hours; check back tomorrow.

A Pirate's Life

      Most people have at least a passing familiarity with Odysseus’ adventures, either from reading about them in (e.g.) a high school English class, or just because he’s influential in our zeitgeist. But there’s so much unspoken material about Odysseus hiding in plain sight, far beyond what might come up in an English class. For example: what does Odysseus do for a living? He’s a pirate. Let’s not kid ourselves; he may be the charismatic hero of the epic (the Johnny Depp of his day), but he’s still a pirate. He supports himself by traveling around to places he doesn’t live, and taking other people’s belongings, and either killing them or threatening to kill them if they resist. Even though he gets billed as the King of Ithaca, who may well have been able to support himself sufficiently through taxing his populace, he nevertheless chooses to make various stops on his way home from Troy for the purpose of plundering the homes of hapless strangers. Go back and read the passage on the Cyclops’ island when Odyssey first leads his men--just a few of his strongest and most elite men, you’ll notice--into the Cyclops’ cave. He realizes that this cave is someone’s dwelling (but temporarily empty), so he begins opening up containers and looking for anything of value. When they find the baskets full of cheeses, they begin devouring the cheeses and generally tearing into the Cyclops’ livelihood. If you study the Odyssey, say in a high school class, you’ll hear a lot about hospitality customs and people who are conspicuously bad hosts to Odysseus, but you might not hear about what a bad guest Odysseus himself is, and how his behavior in the Cyclops’ cave is parallel to the Suitors’ behavior in his own house: just like the suitors, he offends the host by appropriating food and other things that the uninvited guest has no right to.

      Near the end of Odysseus’ journey, when you’d think he should have learned his lesson, Odysseus falls victim to the same trap of being a bad guest on the Island of the Sun. The Island is full of delicious cattle, the Sun’s personal flock, and Odysseus has been warned not to eat it. In fact, Circe even provided Odysseus with a supply of magical food to spare him from the necessity of eating the forbidden cattle. But taboo stories in myth are not meaningful until someone breaks the taboo, so naturally his men one day grow tired of magic food and decide to kill a cow. When they finally set sail again, the sea surges up wrathfully and kills them in a storm, all of them down to the last man except Odysseus, who clings to one of the beams of the ship. The storm is so fierce that he’s stripped naked except for a goddess’ magic scarf that he has tied around his head (and before you ask, there are in fact academic articles out there about Odysseus and cross-dressing). He manages to survive, but only at the cost of everything he had. And, we hope, he learns a valuable lesson about how to be a good guest.

      (Actually, Odysseus’ wearing of the goddess’ veil is commonly identified as one of the feminine aspects of Odysseus’ character in the Odyssey, part of a larger pattern of narrative interest in strong feminine characters and feminine spheres of work, as opposed to the Iliad, which is grounded in the masculine world. Robert Graves took this so far as to speculate that the Odyssey was essentially a Mary Sue fanfic composed by a Sicilian princess (represented in the epic by Nausicaa), and he wrote his novel Homer’s Daughter on this premise. It’s quite an interesting book, if somewhat dated in its view of the Odyssey’s composition. Still, I’ve never found anyone who seriously believes that the Odyssey was composed by a Sicilian princess. And personally I’d be surprised if it had been, since Odysseus is a pretty big cad for a teenaged virgin to invent.)

      (And in case you have any doubts about Odysseus’ piratical life, re-read the beginning of the Iliad, and take note of all the casual references to the Greeks traveling up and down the coast of Asia Minor and stealing food and treasure and people from cities not fortified as well as Troy. How do you think the Greeks were feeding themselves in a hostile country? I know the movie Troy depicts Briseis as an innocent young cousin of Hector, born and bred in the city of Troy, but in the epic she’s not Trojan--she’s been enslaved after having been stolen from a nearby city, an ordinary day's work for the marauding Greek army.)

      In pursuit of this occupation, Odysseus’ most carefully honed professional skill is lying. It was second nature to him to such a degree that it was hard for him to break the habit. There’s a terrible scene at the end of the Odyssey--terrible to my mind, anyway--when Odysseus has finally returned home and reveals himself to his father. Now his father has been so distressed by Odysseus’ prolonged absence that he’s abdicated the kingship and went to live in poverty and misery farming a tiny strip of land, which I imagine was an awful life, since he was well past his prime and the soil in Greece is generally very rocky. Not only that, in the twenty years that Odysseus has been absent, his mother has died of a broken heart, and his father is alone except for some slaves and one elderly housekeeper. Probably Odysseus’ son is one of those inconsiderate young people who never visits his elder relatives. But Odysseus has finally come back and goes out to the field where his father is miserably hoeing a rocky furrow, and Odysseus…lies to him. He thinks it over very carefully, too: when he finds his father laboring away among the thorns in filthy clothing and general misery, Odysseus pauses to consider whether he should just run over and embrace his father--and on consideration, he decides that he’d rather feed his father a pack of lies and make him even more miserable (taking time along the way to remark on his father’s disgraceful appearance and pretend to mistake him for a slave). So Odysseus doesn’t admit to being Odysseus. He says that he’s a stranger who met Odysseus briefly long in the past, and he hasn’t seen Odysseus in five years. And his father is devastated, so much so that he starts scouring himself with dirt. And after watching this for a while, Odysseus admits that he actually is Odysseus, and apparently they’re fine again. This is when his professional practices have become so entrenched that they interfere with every aspect of his life.

      Speaking of his profession, didn’t Odysseus have some other profession going on? Besides being a pirate and inveterate liar…oh, right, he was King of Ithaca. Sounds like a nice job; apparently Odysseus was so attached to it that he didn’t want to obey his conscription to Troy, and feigned insanity in attempt to dodge the draft (apparently insanity will exempt you from service in Agamemnon’s army but doesn’t disqualify anyone from kingship on Ithaca). But what responsibilities were entailed in this kingship? We can assume that the position granted Odysseus a certain degree of power and wealth, but those privileges generally entail a proportional amount of work in the form of civic planning and decision making. When Odysseus disappeared for twenty years, who was running the government in his place? Was he so non-essential that his absence didn’t disturb the government’s ability to run? It’s common knowledge that the Suitors spent their time lounging around drunk in Odysseus’ palace, so let’s assume that they aren’t doing any heavy lifting for the local government. His son was too young to be in power, and his wife was only valued as marriage material. Presumably someone else was in power while Odysseus was off practicing piracy, and Penelope was busy pretend-weaving, and Telemachus was still a callow youth. Was this person or group forced out of power when Odysseus returned? Did they willingly step aside?

      I know, I know: sailing around to magic islands and massacring Suitors with an heirloom bow makes for much more compelling narrative than meetings of the local sanitary sewer committee. But there ought to have been a power structure resistant to Odysseus when he suddenly showed up to reclaim the job that he had managed to hold in absentia for twenty years, and I’ve always been curious about who was actually running the government while the King was gone.

      As a final note, this post has dealt primarily with Odysseus as the hero of the Odyssey and all the Johnny Depp-style flair he commands in that role, but that’s actually not how Odysseus was usually seen in the ancient world. It’s worth comparing the Odysseus in Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, which as a tragedy is built around different character types and relationships. The swashbuckling hero who outsmarts the Cyclops and sails away triumphantly doesn’t fit into the tragic world, and Odysseus in Philoctetes is someone very different. This story takes place during the Trojan War. Philoctetes, like Odysseus, was conscripted to fight in the war, but on a stop on the way over to Troy, he was bitten by a snake. He didn’t die, but his wound was festering and stinking so badly that Odysseus abandoned him alone on an island, and left him there for ten years, and only returned to collect him because an oracle reported that Philoctetes possessed an item that was necessary for the Greeks to win the war. Sophocles’ Philoctetes picks up when Odysseus has just arrived on the island and is plotting how to convince Philoctetes to hand over the item and help the war effort. Specifically, he’s corrupting the young and principled Neoptolemus by persuading him to lie to Philoctetes until he hands over the item. In the end, Neoptolemus is unable to deceive Philoctetes into handing over the item, and too honorable to steal it; Odysseus’ attempt to steal the item is also foiled, and the drama is only resolved when a god orders Philoctetes to go to Troy already and let the Greeks win (a rather blatant and unsatisfying deus ex machina). In short, Odysseus still has all the same qualities as he does as the hero of the Odyssey--deceit, cunning, and a complete lack of compunction for stealing things that he finds useful--but here these qualities are cast as reprehensible, and everyone hates him because of them. So if you read the Odyssey and thought that Odysseus was a jerk, and wondered why the ancient Greeks didn’t have some moral code that frowned on lying and stealing, fear not! They did have such a moral code. It’s just that one of the most commonly read Greek texts in mainstream culture happens to ignore that moral code for the sake of glorifying its morally dubious hero.

The Power Behind the Throne

      If there was anyone who could plan for the political future, it was Tanaquil, a serious power-behind-the-throne figure from the legends of the Roman regal period. She was queen of Rome when Rome was just an Italian hill town with very little influence over the surrounding territory, but she used that influence for all it was worth. Her Etruscan origins provided her with the ability to interpret omens (a skill traditionally associated with Etruscan priests), which worked greatly to her advantage when planning for future political events, and which she ostensibly used to the benefit of the Roman state, even at the expense of her own family. Livy’s version is most useful for my purposes, so let’s see what he says.

      At the outset, Tanaquil lives in Etruria and is married to the son of a Greek immigrant. Apparently the Etruscans had a certain degree of hostility toward immigrants, so Tanaquil and her husband Lucumo set off for Rome--since Rome was recently founded, and had been established as a refuge for people rejected from more respectable communities, the Romans were still friendly to outsiders. She may have also known that Roman kings were chosen by election rather than by inheritance--that is, when the old king dies, anyone can run for king--and so seen possibilities for her own future. Tanaquil and Lucumo even receive a good omen on their way to Rome: an eagle (symbol of Roman regal power) steals Lucumo’s hat, and then “crowns” him by returning it. (For those of you planning sightseeing trips to Rome, this is supposed to have happened on the north edge of the Janiculum, just south of St. Peter’s Square.) Upon arrival in Rome, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus (the Roman name Lucumo uses to introduce himself to the neighbors) is able to easily make friends on account of his plentiful wealth--throwing big parties and buying rounds of drinks was just as popular then as it always has been. And he proceeds to do so, since he (and also his wife behind the scenes) is very eager to advance his political career.

      Eventually the Roman king dies, and candidacy for the new king is opened for bids. Tarquinius campaigns so persuasively (I can picture the parties now) that he is elected unanimously to be the new king, but there’s a problem: the old king left two young sons behind. In theory, they shouldn’t be an obstacle--the Roman kingship was never inherited from father to son before--but the sense of entitlement can run deep, and Tarquinius worries about what claims they might make on the basis of their father’s position. At the time of the election, he makes sure they’re off on a hunting trip (note: in mythology, hunting trips are frequently opportunities for people to be accidentally killed (see Adonis, Meleager and his uncles) or at least grievously injured and given a permanent scar (see Odysseus), although, inconveniently for Tarquinius, that’s not what happens to these boys). After the election, he makes sure to shore up his popularity immediately.

      Tarquinius’ wife is an Etruscan omen-reader, and for that reason, Tarquinius himself holds great faith in omen-reading. He’s credited with imposing rigorous superstitious regulations upon the Roman army, so if you’ve ever heard the story of Clodius and the Sacred Chickens (“If they will not eat, let them drink!” SPLASH), you know Clodius would blame Tarquinius for his problems. He’s also credited with laying the foundations of the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, which can be admired today in the basement of the Musei Capitolini. And he has a number of military exploits, none of which really involve Tanaquil. Her influence as the conniving schemer who shaped Roman history really becomes apparent after many years have passed. The former king’s sons were shuttled out of the way during the election, but as the years went on they become restive for power, feel a growing entitlement to their father’s political position. With that in mind, they engineer a riot in the Roman Forum, in which Tarquinius is gravely injured. And this is where Tanaquil comes in, because her injured husband was given into her care.

      While she’s facing down her husband’s injury (stressful enough, I’m sure), she’s also dealing with the question of who the next king would be, if Tarquinius should die. Of course there are the former king’s sons, who by all indications are vicious parasites, more interested in their own power than the good of the people. Tanaquil and Tarquinius have two sons of their own, but apparently Tanaquil isn’t too keen on them as future kings, either. In theory, any Roman man could campaign for king as Tarquinius had done, but Tanaquil isn’t about to allow that. No, she has a candidate in mind for king, and she had her own reasons for it. There had been a boy in their household, a slave who was captured in a war with a nearby town. One day Tanaquil noticed him sleeping in front of a fire, and saw a wreath of flames burst out around his head--but the flames didn’t appear to hurt him, so she forbade anyone to put them out. As with Tarquinius’ eagle-stolen hat, she decided that this was a sign that the boy, Servius Tullius, would be king. (Servius turned out to have regal ancestry from before he was enslaved--which is rather strange, considering the bad rap kings’ sons generally get in Livy). Anyway, Tanaquil decides that Servius is special and sets out to make him king--to start, she marries him to one of her daughters. Later, when her husband is injured in the riot, she thinks it over some more.

      Tarquinius, as it happens, is dead. He dies of his injuries in the riot, and Tanaquil is left alone to steer her choice of kings into the throne. (It’s reminiscent of MacBeth, in which the character is told a favorable prophecy and then works very hard to make the prophecy come true.) She accomplishes it thus: she shuts up her husband’s corpse in a private room and denies everyone else access to him. She addresses the populace herself, speaking on behalf of her “injured” husband, and announces that Tarquinius is badly injured but conscious, and has requested that Servius rule in his place until he recovers. So for a number of days, Servius goes around gaining experience in the kingship while Tanaquil pretends that Tarquinius is still alive; only when Tanaquil fears the corpse is becoming unbearable does she announce his death. Then she presents Servius as the most experienced and qualified candidate for king, and he is elected in preference to all the other candidates.

      One noteworthy theme throughout Livy’s history of regal Rome is that inheritance is a poor criterion on which to choose rulers, and king’s sons do not themselves make good kings. If you’re really invested in Tarquinius’ success, don’t ask about his legacy. Servius is presented as a well-chosen king who accomplishes many benefits to the state. But eventually he’s murdered by his own daughter (more over-entitled regal offspring) so that her husband--Tarquinius Superbus, a.k.a. Tarquin the Proud, son of former king Tarquinius Priscus--can seize the throne. Tarquin the Proud became the seventh king of Rome and was a brutal ruler, aggressive toward neighboring realms and oppressive toward his own people. And his son, Sextus Tarquinius, was even worse. He decided that ordinary Roman law didn’t apply to king’s sons, and felt entitled to rape the married woman of his choice, an illustration of the egregious violations of law this monster was capable of. If you believe Livy, this callous disregard of law was the instigation for the Roman revolution that resulted in the new republican government. In reality the process was probably more complex than that, involving interference from Tarquinius Superbus’ Etruscan allies, but it’s hard to tell due to ‘winners write the history books’-type reasons. However it happened, the Romans got rid of their system of kingship and adopted a system designed to thwart any one person or family from monopolizing power, which held the state together for at least a few hundred years.

A Self-Determined Woman

      I admit, I unabashedly love Circe. She’s the daughter of the Sun, she does whatever she wants, and she doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it. She lives on a little island and has autocratic rule over the whole thing, with very little interference from other gods. She’s a wonderfully confident, powerful woman, utterly unfazed by whatever might wash up on her shore.

      Most people know Circe from the Odyssey, where she’s a cool, self-possessed goddess who enjoys a blissfully liberated lifestyle. When Odysseus’ men arrive at her house, she barely has to raise a finger to turn them into pigs, and when Odysseus himself shows up with the antidote, she is duly impressed--so impressed that she, being a woman confident in her sexuality, seduces him without a second thought for Penelope. Odysseus willingly goes along with her. (Although Circe usually exudes confidence, there’s an excellent Etruscan mirror that shows Odysseus and one of his men threatening Circe with a sword; Circe has thrown up her hands in surprise and seems to be mewling for help. It looks hilariously unlike how I usually picture her.) After Circe returns Odysseus’ men to human form, she casually continues seducing Odysseus for a year, and he, apparently unconcerned for Penelope, continues to oblige her.

      After spending a year with this literal sex goddess, though, Odysseus decides to move on. He asks Circe for certain information about how to return to Ithaca. Circe tells him that to obtain this information, he has to sail to the edge of the world and, at a certain vent of the Underworld, consult the Theban seer Tiresias. Odysseus approaches the dead at great personal danger, and one of his men actually dies in the process--on the night before they sail for the Underworld, he falls asleep on Circe’s roof while drunk, then when he wakes up in the morning he rolls off the roof. After all this trouble Odysseus gains the information he wants, and he returns to Circe, who proceeds to repeat to him everything he just heard from Tiresias. (And all of us reading shout at the page, ‘If you already knew all that, why did you make Odysseus go to the Underworld?) She’s nobody’s Helpful Princess.

      An interesting question to ask about Circe is where in the world she lives. In the Odyssey she’s said to live on an island named Aeaea, but trying to map Odysseus’ travels onto real life locations is a laughable endeavor. As he travels back from Troy to Greece, you can trace his course a certain distance; Odysseus states that he got as far as Cape Malea--a real location that can be found easily on a map--before being blown off course. Once he goes off course, his directions and distances become extremely vague, and all the charting has to be done by guesswork. At this point in the Odyssey there are plenty of places for which Odysseus gives practically zero identifying information, such as the Land of the Lotus-Eaters or the Laestrygonians; nevertheless, there will always be plenty of over-imaginative people who are eager to make fantasy and reality fit into one convenient narrative, and will happily supply real places as equivalencies to mythical locations on minimal evidence. (For example, when I was in Crete, my guidebook pointed out THE VERY TREE under which Zeus raped Europa when he abducted her from Sidon, after having transformed into a bull and swum more than 600 miles, across the Mediterranean, with a girl on his back, still in the shape of a bull. Really! You can look it up in a book.) My point is: it’s pretty silly to be mapping fantasy locations from the Odyssey onto locations in the real world, since Homer was often describing places he had never visited; rather, he was using fourth-hand descriptions of poorly mapped locations and exotic natural phenomena that could easily be exaggerated or mischaracterized through honest misunderstanding or for dramatic effect, and he was adapting these into fantasy settings in service of a narrative that was, if not totally fictional, extremely distantly removed from fact. But that won’t stop people from trying.

      So where did Circe live? Generally she’s understood to have lived on an island on the west coast of Italy. (The reason for this is that Scylla and Charybdis, two monstrous hazards in a narrow strait, are read as a fish-story analogue for the Straits of Messina, the dangerous but otherwise ordinary passage between Italy and Sicily. Circe’s island is supposed to be somewhere near Scylla and Charybdis.) And sure enough, if you go along the west coast of Italy you’ll find an island that various imaginative people identify as Circe’s island. Except that it’s not an island; it’s a promontory that is firmly attached to the mainland. Still, it has a very striking look. The whole area is a very broad plain, stretched out nearly flat and all at sea level. The Circeo, as it’s called, rises suddenly out of this plain with very steep cliffs just at the plain reaches the water. In fact there are geological reasons why the Circeo used to be an island separated from the mainland, but the island would have been joined to the mainland well before Homer started writing--if Homer had a real island in mind for Circe, this promontory couldn’t have been on the list of candidates.

      Still, the widespread belief that the Circeo was an island in Odysseus’ time gave rise to plenty of stories about Circe interacting with legendary Italian heroes, and inflicting her unabashedly independent personality upon them. For example, she met a certain hero named Picus, someone she wanted to sleep with but who didn’t want to sleep with her. (Ovid tells us he was monogamously committed to another woman.) Circe didn’t appreciate this answer, so she turned him into a bird. For good measure, whenever someone came to ask her where Picus was, she turned them into an animal also. She also pulled an amusing trick on her father, reported in the Aeneid. Her father, being the Sun, has a team of magnificent, fiery stallions that he drives across the sky each day. Circe admired these horses, and so snuck a few mares into the stables and let the stallions impregnate them. The result was a cohort of half-immortal horses that are given to Aeneas--but not by Circe. Aeneas apparently has read the Odyssey and knows the dangers of dealing with Circe, so rather than finding a magical antidote from her spells he assiduously avoids her island altogether, and never encounters her in the Aeneid. The horses are given to Aeneas by an Italian king, although it’s never really explained how the king wheedled them away from Circe.

      For a final thought, remember that Circe did keep Odysseus on her island for a year and was seducing him all along: she had a couple new children at the end of it. Odysseus left, but his children grew up with Circe, and one of them, Telegonus, actually went looking for Odysseus when he grew up. When Telegonus finally found Odysseus, they got into one of those Oedipus-and-Laius-style arguments heavy on the dramatic irony in which no one asks for his opponent’s name, and Telegonus ended up killing Odysseus, only to be horrified when he discovered the identity of the man he had killed. At the end of the story, not only did Telegonus marry Penelope (his father’s widow, but unrelated to Telegonus), but Telemachus (Odysseus’ son by Penelope, in case you’ve forgotten all the names from high school) went off to Aeaea and married Circe (also a former romantic partner of his father, also unrelated to Telemachus). I suspect that neither was a very happy marriage--in the Odyssey, Telemachus attacks his mother for appearing in front of guests within her own house, so I doubt he would like Circe’s practices of independence and sexual liberation. He seems like the machismo-obsessed type who always has to prove that he’s in control of his wife. Still, they were probably happier than Penelope and Telegonus. After all, if Penelope is as clever as everyone wants to think she is, certainly she could figure out who Telegonus’ father was. And how would you feel if you had stood by as the Paragon of Fidelity for twenty years, chastely waiting for your spouse to return home, only to have his bastard son show up years later? At the end of the story I wouldn’t want to be Circe despite all her powers and independence, but I especially wouldn’t want to be Penelope, who learned after her husband’s death that their idealized marriage was only idealized on one side.