Summary
Aeolus, keeper of the winds, entertains them a month and gives Odysseus a bag containing all the winds but the west. Within sight of Ithaca, with Odysseus asleep, the crew open it believing it holds treasure. They are blown back. Aeolus refuses them a second time, judging them hated by the gods.
At the harbour of the Laestrygonians, giants destroy eleven of the twelve ships with boulders and spear the men like fish. Only Odysseus's ship, moored outside, escapes.
On Aeaea, a scouting party under Eurylochus reaches Circe's house. She drugs them and turns them into swine; Eurylochus escapes to report. Hermes meets Odysseus and gives him the herb moly as a counter-drug and instructions.
Odysseus resists the drug, threatens Circe with his sword, and exacts an oath. The men are restored. They stay a year, until the crew urge departure. Circe tells Odysseus he must first go to the house of Hades to consult the shade of the seer Tiresias. Elpenor, the youngest, falls from the roof and dies as they leave.
Narrative function
Reduces the expedition from twelve ships to one and then from many men to few, and sets up the journey to the dead.
Greek concepts in this book
- pharmakon
- Drug — both poison and remedy. Circe's is transformative; moly is the counter-drug; the Lotus was another. The poem thinks repeatedly about substances that alter the will.
- moly
- The plant Hermes gives, black at the root and white in flower, hard for mortals to dig — the poem's own note that this is not an ordinary herb.
Connections to other books
Book 9
The crew's opening of the bag repeats the Ciconian pattern: disaster caused by the men's appetite while their leader is inattentive.
Book 11 · Book 12
Circe both sends Odysseus to the dead and, on his return, gives the sailing directions for the Sirens, Scylla and Thrinacia.
Source notes
Circe is described as the daughter of Helios and sister of Aeëtes (10.135-139), which places her in the Argonautic family. The Odyssey knows the Argo story and refers to it at 12.69-72. Her later literary life — including the Telegonus tradition, in which she bears Odysseus a son who eventually kills him — belongs to the Epic Cycle, not to this poem.
Reading it responsibly
The Circe episode is where the poem is furthest from modern moral intuitions and most often quietly rewritten. Odysseus draws a sword on her, she offers her bed, he requires an oath before accepting, and they then live together for a year while his men wait. The oath is the poem's device for making the arrangement safe rather than consensual in any modern sense. Retellings that turn her into a straightforward victim, or into a straightforward temptress, are each taking one half of a text that contains both.