Scylla is the cliff-monster of the narrow strait — woman above the waist, but below it six heads and twelve dog's feet — who lurks in a vaulted cave and snatches sailors from passing ships, opposite the whirlpool Charybdis across the channel.1
Circe describes the horror that waits for Odysseus in the strait. Hidden up to her waist in a vaulted cave too high for any arrow to reach, Scylla yelps with a voice no louder than a new-born whelp, yet she is an evil monster no god would gladly meet: twelve feet all misshapen, six exceedingly long necks, and on each a fearful head holding three thick rows of teeth full of black death. From her cave she fishes for dolphins, dogfish, and whatever larger prey she can seize, and from every ship that passes she carries off a man for each of her ravening heads.2
Circe counsels Odysseus that no force can master Scylla; he must row past with all his might and call upon Crataeis, the mother of Scylla, who bore her for a bane to mortals, so that she will hold her daughter from darting forth a second time. Crataeis is the one parent Homer names for the monster.3
When Odysseus took Circe's counsel and rowed nearer to Scylla's cliff than to Charybdis, the monster struck: she snatched six of his comrades — one for each of her ravening heads — and carried them shrieking to her cave, where she devoured them at the very doors while he, on the poop, stretched out his hands to them in vain. It was the most pitiful sight his eyes had looked upon in all his sufferings.4
Apollodorus names her a daughter of Crataeis and "Trienus or Phorcys," with the face and breast of a woman but six dog-heads and twelve dog-feet from the flanks down. Odysseus sails past her cliff fully armed on the poop; Scylla appears, snatches six of his comrades, and gobbles them up.5
Apollonius, in the warning Hera carries through Thetis, makes the father Phorcys outright and the mother the night-wandering goddess Hecate, who is here called Crataeis — the deadly Ausonian Scylla of the strait.6
Hyginus instead lists Scylla — woman above but dog-formed below — among the brood of Typhon and Echidna, alongside the Gorgon, Cerberus, the Colchian dragon, the Chimaera, the Sphinx, and the Hydra.7
Ovid alone tells of a Scylla made rather than born. Once a maiden with a girl's own face, she was loved by the sea-god Glaucus; when she spurned him, the jealous sorceress Circe — who desired Glaucus herself — poisoned the bay where Scylla bathed, so that girdling hounds sprang howling from her loins and the maiden became the dog-girt terror of the strait.8
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
