SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

This article appears in Volume V24, Page 519 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: SCY-SHA

SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS . In

Homer

HOMER, WINSLOW (1836-191o)

(Od. xii. 73, 235, 430) Scylla is a dreadful sea-

monster

, daughter of Crataeis, with six
heads, twelve feet and a voice like the yelp of a puppy. She dwelt in a sea-cave looking to'the west, far up the face of a huge cliff. Out of her cave she stuck her heads, fishing for marine creatures and snatching the

seamen

SEAMEN,
LAWS
- LAWS
RELATING TO

out of passing ships. Within a bowshot of this cliff was another lower cliff with a

great

GREAT

fig-tree growing on it. Under this second

rock

dwelt Charybdis, who thrice a day sucked in and thrice spouted out the sea water. Between these rocks Odysseus sailed, and Scylla snatched six men out of his ship. In later classical times Scylla and Charybdis, whose position is not defined by

Homer

HOMER, WINSLOW (1836-191o)

, were localized in the Straits of MessinaScylla on the Italian, Charybdis on the Sicilian side (Strabo i. p. 24; vi. p. 268). The well-known line, Incidis in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim, occurs in the Alexandreis of Gautier de

Lille

LILLE

, a poet of the 12th century. In
1 This Heracleides is noticed in an Egyptian papyrus containing a fragment of the historian Sosylus, which alludes, by way of comparison, to the tactical ability displayed by him at the battle of Artemisium (Wilcken in Hermes, xli., 1906, pp. 103 seq.).
Ovid (Metam. xiv. 1-74) Scylla appears as a beautiful maiden beloved by the sea-god Glaucus and other deities, and changed by the jealous Circe (or other rival) into a sea-

monster

; after-wards she was transformed into a

rock

shunned by fishermen. According to a

late

LATE

legend (Servius on Aeneid, 420), Charybdis was a voracious woman who robbed Heracles of his cattle and was therefore cast into the sea by Zeus, where she retained her old voracious nature. In later poetry and art Scylla was conceived of as a maiden above, with dogs' or wolves' heads growing out of her

body

BODY

, and the tail of a fish.
Another Scylla, confounded. by Virgil (Eel. vi. 74) with the sea-monster, was a daughter of Nisus (q.v.), king of

Megara

MEGARA

. See O. Waser, Skylla and Charybdis in der Literatur and Kunst der
Griechen and Romer (1894); and D. Jobst, Skyll and Charybdis (Wurzburg, 1902), who endeavours to show that the Homeric description really referred, as the ancients assumed, to the Sicilian straits.

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