Circe turns Odysseus’s crew into pigs within minutes of their arrival on her island — one of the most famous transformations in Western literature — and then, when Odysseus resists her magic with an herb given to him by Hermes, does something the poem doesn’t fully explain: she falls for him, restores his men, and keeps him as a welcome guest, not a captive, for an entire year.
It’s a strange, ambiguous episode that later retellings have interpreted wildly differently — a seductress, a genuine partner, a woman with real power on her own island who simply chooses, unlike most figures in the poem, not to punish Odysseus for his arrival. Homer leaves the moral reading open in a way he rarely does elsewhere in the epic.
She’s one of several formidable women — alongside Penelope and the deadly Sirens — who make the Odyssey, for all its focus on one man’s journey, a poem genuinely fascinated by female power in nearly every form it can imagine.
Enjoyed this piece?
Get the next one — our essays on the classics and news of each new Erato Press edition — straight to your inbox.