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.