Circe

“Not every god need be the same.” 

Prometheus’s words to a young Circe shape her personal development. Her uncle becomes her conscience and gives her the critical, fundamental lesson that she does not have to be cruel and vicious like the other gods. Instead, she can choose to be like him. This revelation is the foundation of the story and Circe’s moral character.

“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.” 

After feeling love for the first time, Circe believes nothing could possibly stand against it. When her grandmother dismisses her certainty that her love for Glaucos will have a happy end, she is stubborn and selfish. Later, seeing her niece Medea demonstrate the same behavior, Circe recognizes it as the childish arrogance of youth.

“I was too wild to feel any shame. It was true. I would not just uproot the world, but tear it, burn it, do any evil I could to keep Glaucos by my side.” 

Confident that her love will guarantee a happy ending with Glaucos, Circe feels no guilt for her rebellion. She will regret the consequences of this all-consuming focus for the rest of her very long life.

“What could make a god afraid? I knew that answer too. A power greater than their own.” 

When mentioning pharmaka to her grandmother Tethys, Circe notes her fear and rage. She takes this reaction to mean that pharmaka does exist and, with powers greater than a god’s, it could be used to turn Glaucos immortal.

“A knowledge woke in the depths of my blood. It whispered: that the strength of those flowers lay in their sap, which could transform any creature to its truest self.” 

When kneeling next to the sleeping Glaucos, distraught over her failure to make him a god, Circe has a moment of revelation that sets the course of her destiny. This epiphany of how to use the pharmaka is her first step in becoming a witch.

“But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.” 

After Glaucos spurns her for the beautiful Scylla, Circe despairs. Unlike mortals, who only have to carry their pains until death, the gods have no such expiration date. The all-consuming grief she feels is agonizing and seemingly without end, prompting her to do more witchcraft in a jealous rage in the hopes of attaining the happy ending she believes she and Glaucos deserve together.

“What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know

Having confessed to her crimes, Circe has been disfigured by her father. She returns to the island where she found the pharmaka and plans to use it to reveal what she is at her core, whether it’s a god like Glaucos or monstrosity like Scylla. Ultimately, she decides that she would rather not have confirmation that she is a monster and does not use the flower’s sap to transform herself.

“I had made so many mistakes that I could not find my way back through their tangle to the first one. Was it changing Scylla, changing Glaucos, swearing the oath to my grandmother? Speaking to Glaucos in the first place? I felt a sickening unease that it went back further still, back to the first breath I ever drew.” 

Circe is tormented by her guilt for setting tragic events in motion but cannot decide where she went wrong. She suspects that she should never have been born at all to avoid such evils coming to pass.

“Yet, because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.” 

In studying witchcraft on her island, Circe is able to learn through her humility. Rather than aiming for impressive and powerful spells, she begins slowly and accrues knowledge in the basic principles of sorcery. As such, she becomes a powerful witch through her hard work, building on the fundamentals after she masters them.

“I had no right to claim him. I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.” 

The solitude of her exile weighs on Circe, and her brief reprieve in Crete is unpleasant due to the presence of her sister and the Minotaur. However, being around others also reminds Circe of what she lacks—companionship. Her time with Daedalus is precious to her and will remain so long after his death. The solace they find in each other gives Circe hope that she might not spend all of eternity desperately alone.

“I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself. Rage and grief, thwarted desire, lust, self-pity: these are emotions gods know well. But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone.” 

After returning to Aiaia from Crete, Pasiphaë’s accusations as to Circe’s character—specifically her naivete and willful ignorance—sting. Still, Circe acknowledges that she had not noticed her mother’s power or her sister’s suffering and that this does not speak well of her. Circe’s trip to Crete scrapes away more of her naivete and teaches her that remorse is a learned response to a god, something she has to work for.

“Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile, every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.” 

Hermes informs Circe that her kindhearted niece, Ariadne, was killed by Artemis over some unknown, “incomprehensible slight” (159). Though she knows she lacks the power to do so, Circe wishes to use her magic to take vengeance on Artemis. As she mourns for Daedalus, Icarus, and Ariadne, she bitterly laments that those who do not deserve death receive it, but the cruel and selfish gods are eternal. This represents another step that distances Circe from the other gods.

“That old sickening feeling returned: that every moment of my life I had been a fool.” 

After Medea’s insults and her brief reunion with Aeëtes, Circe is circumspect about her loneliness. She reviews her memories of her beloved brother in their youth and suspects that Pasiphaë’s accusation that he never loved her was true. She worries that she has never once been loved in her life, that she has always been truly alone, and that she will be alone for all eternity.

“No, I thought. I was not careful. I was reckless, headlong. He was another knife, I could feel it. A different sort, but a knife still. I did not care. I thought: give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for.” 

When Odysseus and Circe meet and reach their impasse, Circe suggests they make a truce over sex. He agrees on the condition that she swear on the River Styx not to harm him and calls them both careful. Circe acknowledges the risk she takes in inviting Odysseus into her life but believes his companionship will be worth the inevitable pain it causes.

“When I had taken him to my bed, it had been a kind of dare, but the feeling that flickered in me now was much older. There he was, his flesh open before me. This is something torn that I can mend.” 

Circe’s newfound relationship with Odysseus is a balm to her loneliness. Once again, she finds herself longing to fix something—him. This represents a turning point and revival of the lighter side of Circe’s personality, which had given way to ruthlessness after her rape.

“How many times would I have to learn? Every moment of my peace was a lie, for it came only at the gods’ pleasure. No matter what I did, how long I lived, at a whim they would be able to reach down and do with me what they wished.” 

When Apollo arrives and forces a vision of prophecy for Odysseus into her mind, Circe is reminded that whatever semblance of control she finds on the island is an illusion. The gods have her under their power and while they will not protect her from rapists, they can and will drop in on her to violate her mind or whatever else they please. She acknowledges that she has no ability to stop them.

“Odysseus, son of Laertes, the great traveler, prince of wiles and tricks and a thousand ways. He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.” 

Circe’s relationship with Odysseus is precious in its novelty. He shares all his stories, but she gives none in return. To him, she was “the golden witch with no past” (215), not the woman who made the monster Scylla. Their companionship and collaboration in the shared delusion of her lack of negative experiences seem to be just what Circe wants.

“My whole life, I had waited for tragedy to find me. I never doubted that it would, for I had desires and defiance and powers more than others thought I deserved, all the things that draw the thunderstroke. A dozen times grief had scorched, but its fire had never burned through my skin. My madness in those days rose from a new certainty: that at last, I had met the thing the gods could use against me.” 

Although her son is the solution to her profound loneliness, Circe realizes that he is also her vulnerability. The gods could kill her, but that would have consequences. They could exile her, but she would live. Her son, however, can be used against her just as her sister used Icarus against Daedalus. The fear that her innocent child will be harmed to control or punish her overwhelms Circe.

“I had wanted him to walk freely in the world, unburnt and unafraid, and now I had gotten my wish. He could not conceive of a relentless goddess with her spear aimed at his heart.” 

Through Circe’s desire to ensure her child’s happiness and safety, she has left him unprepared to understand the danger he will face if he leaves the island as planned. Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also a vulnerability. Circe profoundly regrets fostering that ignorance in her mortal son.

“At the time, I had been boasting, showing off my ruthlessness. I had felt untouchable, filled with teeth and power. I scarcely remembered what that was like.” 

In recounting her conversation with Odysseus about not caring whether the sailors she turned to pigs would attack her or not—that their entrance to her house was enough—Circe remembers how fearless and arrogant she felt in those days. As a mother, she no longer has that luxury of feeling invincible—she now has a vulnerability named Telegonus.

“But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we only see the mirror of our own faults.” 

It is clear to Circe that Odysseus’s suspicious mind, always searching for hidden agendas, would have never understood Telemachus’s openness. She considers that all parents’ view of their children is inherently skewed to reflect the worst of the parents’ flaws.

“It was my oldest fear, that white annihilation. I felt it shiver through me. But enough. At last, enough.” 

Circe confronts her father, extorting him into asking Zeus to lift her banishment. Helios reacts with fury and threats, but Circe holds her ground, finally refusing to live under the control and expectations of the gods and her family. Having faced down Athena for her son’s life, she is now empowered to face her father for the freedom of her own.

“I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.” 

Circe realizes that the weight of her mistakes, bitterness, and disillusionment is not necessarily permanent. She suddenly understands that she can decide for herself who she will be and how she will live from now on. This foreshadows her decision to use the pharmaka to become mortal.