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.
Odysseus Between Scylla and Charybdis
William Bromley, after Henry Fuseli, 1806
Bromley's engraving after a Fuseli watercolour isolates the Odyssey's second ordeal with Charybdis: Odysseus clings to the wild fig tree above the whirlpool while the vortex yawns below and Scylla coils among the rocks at left. Made as an illustration to Pope's Odyssey, the print freezes Circe's counsel made flesh — when the ship is lost, only the fig and the sucking deep remain, and Charybdis is the sea that will either drown or spit the hero back.
Between Scylla and Charybdis
Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, c. 1910
The Hungarian Symbolist Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl restages the proverbial strait as a late Romantic ordeal: the ship trapped between the cliff-monster and the devouring swirl. Painted around 1910, the pastel keeps Charybdis as Homer cast her — not a figured body but the thrice-daily suck of the deep — the hazard Odysseus must skirt if he is to keep any of his crew alive.
On screen
In music & on stage
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.
Ulysses
James Joyce
Joyce titles the library episode Scylla and Charybdis — Stephen Dedalus arguing Shakespeare between two intellectual hazards named for the Homeric strait.