In Greek mythology, Circe is a witch, sometimes considered a goddess or a nymph, daughter of the sun god Helios and the Oceanid Perse in most accounts. Renowned for potions, herbs, and a magic wand, she transforms enemies into animals. Homer's Odyssey places her on the island of Aeaea, where she turns Odysseus's crew into swine before he overcomes her with Hermes's help and stays a year as her guest. Later tradition adds the tales of Scylla and Picus and associates her with the Italian promontory of Circeo.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Circe" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family and attributes
Most accounts make Circe the daughter of Helios and Perse (or Asterope in the Orphic Argonautica), sister of Aeëtes and Pasiphaë and thus aunt of Medea. Rationalizing authors sometimes make her and Medea daughters of a mortalized Hecate by Aeëtes. Homer calls her a dreadful goddess with lovely hair and human speech; Apollonius gives Helios's descendants flashing golden eyes. She dwells on Aeaea — located by Apollonius off the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy — where Roman poets fixed her home at Circeii (Monte Circeo).
Her Homeric epithet polypharmakos, "knowing many drugs," captures her mastery of transformative pharmaka. Ovid implies she may have learned herb-lore from her mother Perse.
II.In the Odyssey
Odysseus's men find Circe's palace amid woods thronged by strangely tame lions and wolves. She drugs their feast and turns them into swine; Eurylochus escapes to warn Odysseus. Hermes gives Odysseus the herb moly and instructs him to threaten Circe and exact an oath before accepting her bed. Odysseus frees his crew, and they remain a year on Aeaea. Circe then advises the journey to the Underworld and, on their return, warns of the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis on the routes home.
Hesiod and the lost Telegony give Circe sons by Odysseus, notably Telegonus and Latinus; Telegonus later kills Odysseus unknowingly and brings Penelope and Telemachus to Aeaea. Variant genealogies make Circe mother of founders of Italian cities or, in Nonnus, of Phaunus by Poseidon.
III.Other myths and cult
In Apollonius's Argonautica Circe purifies Jason and Medea for Absyrtus's murder. Ovid and others tell how she poisoned Scylla's bathing place when Glaucus preferred the nymph to her, and how she turned the Latian king Picus into a woodpecker for spurning her. A myth of the giant Picolous links the origin of moly to blood shed when Helios killed an intruder on Aeaea.
Strabo records a tomb-shrine of Circe among the Pharmacussae off Attica and local veneration at Circeii, where a bowl said to be Odysseus's was shown. Philosophical and moral retellings — from Plutarch's Gryllus to Renaissance dialogues — used her transformations to ask whether beast-life might be preferable to human vice; Western art made her an archetype of the enchantress and predatory female.