Scylla's parentage varies considerably across the ancient sources. Homer, Ovid, Apollodorus, Servius, and a Plato scholiast identify Crataeis as the mother of Scylla; however, neither Homer nor Ovid specifies a father. Apollodorus suggests the father was either Trienus (possibly a corruption of Triton) or Phorcus, a variant of Phorkys.

Other authors name Hecate as her mother instead. The Hesiodic Megalai Ehoiai lists Hecate and Phorbas as the parents of Scylla, while Acusilaus makes her parents Hecate and Phorkys. Apollonius of Rhodes attempted to reconcile these accounts, proposing that Crataeis was another name for Hecate and that she and Phorcys were the parents of Scylla.

Still other traditions diverge further: Stesichorus uniquely names Lamia as her mother, and according to Hyginus, Scylla was the offspring of Typhon and Echidna.

Homer's Odyssey: Circe advises Odysseus to sail closer to Scylla, withholding this counsel from his crew because Charybdis could drown his whole ship. She tells him to hug Scylla's crag and sail past at top speed, since it is better to lose six men and keep the ship than to lose the entire crew. When the crew becomes distracted by Charybdis, Scylla strikes, swinging the men up to her cliff and devouring them raw at her cavern's mouth as they fling their arms toward Odysseus in their mortal struggle.

Ovid's Metamorphoses: The sea-god Glaucus falls in love with the beautiful Scylla, but she rejects his piscine form and flees to a promontory beyond his reach. When Glaucus seeks a love potion from Circe, the enchantress becomes enamored with him instead; failing to win his affections, Circe grows hatefully jealous of her rival and poisons the pool where Scylla bathes, transforming her into a monstrous being. Gaius Julius Hyginus recounts this same version in his Fabulae, and the myth later inspired Jean-Marie Leclair's tragic opera Scylla et Glaucus (1746).

Keats' Endymion: John Keats' retelling in Book 3 of Endymion (1818) diverges from Ovid. Here Circe murders the beautiful nymph rather than transforming her into a monster; Glaucus carries her corpse to a crystal palace at the bottom of the ocean where the bodies of all lovers who have died at sea lie, and after a thousand years Endymion resurrects her and reunites her with Glaucus.

Palaephatus, who sought to explain Greek myths historically, argues that Scylla was not a monster but a swift Tyrrhenian trireme bearing that name inscribed on its prow. Engaged in plundering Sicilian and Ionian coasts, the ship became famous, and Odysseus escaped it through favorable winds; through repeated retellings these maritime events were gradually transformed into the mythological figure. Heraclitus Paradoxographus instead makes Scylla a beautiful courtesan living on an island, who surrounded herself with greedy followers who behaved like dogs to exploit and destroy visitors, with only the ever-cautious and clever Odysseus escaping.

The Byzantine author Procopius explains Scylla's fame not by a real monster-woman but by a fish of the strait formerly called scylax and later cyniscus. He argues that names originally describe actual things, but rumour carrying these names to other peoples produces false opinions through ignorance, until the process becomes a builder of stories and joins with poets as witnesses of things that never happened.

John Tzetzes reinterprets Scylla as a rocky promontory near Rhegium in the Strait of Messina, beneath which lay caves and jagged rocks inhabited by sea creatures; ships caught in Charybdis's currents were driven against these rocks, and the drowned sailors were mythically said to be devoured by Scylla. He also rationalizes the tradition that Heracles killed Scylla: while driving Geryon's cattle through the strait, Heracles lost some of the herd in the dangerous waters, and his practical handling of the hazard was later transformed into the claim that he slew her. Tzetzes explains her revival by her father Phorcys as the sea itself continually recreating the danger, with the burning and revival signifying natural cycles undone over time by the sea's movements and the sun, symbolized by the torch.

Medieval art rarely depicted Scylla. At the Carolingian abbey of Corvey in Westphalia, a unique ninth-century wall painting depicts, among other things, Odysseus' fight with Scylla — an illustration not noted elsewhere in medieval arts.

From the Renaissance onward, European painters focused primarily on the Glaucus and Scylla narrative. Agostino Carracci's 1597 fresco cycle in the Farnese Gallery shows them embracing, a conjunction not sanctioned by the myth, whereas more orthodox versions depict Scylla scrambling away from the amorous arms of the god, as in works by Filippo Lauri and Salvator Rosa. Other artists pictured them divided by their respective elements of land and water, as in Bartholomäus Spranger's 1587 painting in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, while some incorporated Cupid aiming at Glaucus, such as Laurent de la Hyre's work (1640/44) in the Getty Museum and Jacques Dumont le Romain's 1726 painting in Troyes.

J. M. W. Turner's 1841 painting shows Scylla fleeing inland from the advances of Glaucus with two cupids fluttering around her. Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1636) depicted the moment when the horrified Scylla first begins to change under the gaze of Glaucus, while Eglon van der Neer's 1695 Rijksmuseum work shows Circe poisoning the water as Scylla prepares to bathe. Pre-Raphaelite treatments of the poisoning scene include works by John Melhuish Strudwick (1886) and John William Waterhouse's Circe Invidiosa (1892).