Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Charybdis.
The gallery
Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis
Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), 1794–1796
In this dramatic oil on canvas (126 × 101 cm, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau), the Swiss-British Romantic Henry Fuseli stages the most perilous moment of Odyssey 12: the passage of the narrow strait between Scylla and divine Charybdis. Odysseus, muscled and heroic, stands braced on the bow of his ship with his shield raised, while his oarsmen strain below to drive the vessel through the churning water. Charybdis is rendered not as a body but as the deadly whirlpool itself — the seething, sucking sea that Homer likens to a cauldron boiling on a great fire — embodying Circe's warning that not even Poseidon could save a man caught when she draws the black water down.
Scylla and Charybdis (Strait of Messina)
Albert Henry Payne, 1840
This 1840 steel engraving by the English printmaker Albert Henry Payne presents the legendary strait identified in antiquity with the Strait of Messina, where Scylla and Charybdis menaced passing ships from opposite shores. The print gives topographic, picturesque form to the Homeric geography: the rocky narrows where, in Odyssey 12, Charybdis lay beneath the great fig tree and thrice each day sucked down and belched up the sea. Such nineteenth-century engravings popularized the myth as a real-world locale, fixing the proverbial image of being caught 'between Scylla and Charybdis' — between two equally deadly hazards.
In play
Between Scylla and Charybdis
Charybdis' whirlpool half of the proverb still means the worse of two evils — Odysseus' navigational nightmare as ordinary English.
Charybdis
The thrice-daily suck of the deep remains the mythic name for a consuming vortex — Charybdis as disaster that swallows whole.