Homer's Odyssey, Book 10

“She’ll turn us all into pigs or wolves or lions made to guard that palace of hers—by force, I tell you—just as the Cyclops trapped our comrades in his lair, with hotheaded Odysseus right beside them all. Thanks to this man’s rashness they died too!”

Art: Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus, John William Waterhouse (1891)

Homer’s Odyssey, Book 10 Book 9 showcased Odysseus at his most daring and reckless and now, in Book 10, we see the effects this style of leadership has on his crew. In many ways, it’s a book of temptations, betrayals, and one disastrous misstep after another. Their first stop is with Aeolus, the god of the winds, who helps Odysseus by bottling up all the adverse winds in a bag and leaving only the favorable West wind free to blow the Greeks straight home to Ithaca. It’s all going so well until Odysseus’s crew, suspicious and greedy, unties the bag while Odysseus sleeps, thinking it holds treasure. Just like that, they’re blown back to Aeolus, who wants nothing more to do with them. Next, they encounter the Laestrygonians. If you thought Polyphemus was bad, these giants don’t just eat a few men but wreck the entire fleet, leaving only Odysseus’s ship afloat. The survivors make their way to Aeaea, the island of Circe, a sorceress who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs. Thanks to Hermes’ intervention, Odysseus resists her magic. Finally, he manages to convince Circe to restore his crew and host them. But even here, time slips away in a kind of enchanted forgetfulness, and it takes his men urging him forward for Odysseus to finally remember Ithaca. The price of departure? A journey no mortal wants to take. Circe tells them they must sail to the land of the dead to seek wisdom from the shade of the blind seer Tiresias. The message is clear: before he can return home, Odysseus must descend into the underworld, face the ghosts of his past, and prepare for what’s to come. Much like Book 9, this episode reinforces a central theme of The Odyssey: self-control (and reason) vs. reckless desire. Odysseus keeps narrowly escaping disaster, but at every turn, his crew’s impatience or his own arrogance puts them in even greater peril. And yet, we sense a shift here. This time, it’s Odysseus who resists Circe’s intoxicating comforts, reminding us that even the most stubborn of characters can grow.