Compendium · Six-Headed Sea Monster

Scylla

Scylla: the six-headed monster of the Odyssey who lived in a cave above a narrow strait and snatched sailors off their deck, one for each head. Homer gives her twelve feet, a girdle of baying dogs, and a voice like a puppy's yelp. Later tradition made her once-beautiful, a nymph whom the jealous Circe transformed when the sea god Glaucus fell in love with her. A bestiary entry on the monster you cannot fight, only choose your loss against.

Type: Six-Headed Sea Monster
Origin: Greek (Homer's Odyssey, Book 12; Ovid's Metamorphoses 13-14)
Period: Homer c. 8th century BCE; transformation story in Ovid, 1st century CE; localized in the Strait of Messina

Six heads rise out of the cliff and reach for the deck. Each one is a dog’s head on a long writhing neck, and each one takes a man. The men are lifted screaming out of the ship and eaten at the cave mouth while the rest of the crew rows on, because there is nothing to fight. This is Scylla, and in the Odyssey the horror of her is that she cannot be opposed, only paid.

The Shape Homer Gave

Homer is specific about her body, and it is not the shape the later painters liked. She has twelve feet and six necks, each head armed with three rows of teeth. Around her loins he sets the heads of baying dogs, and her voice, the single detail that stays in the mind, he compares to the yelping of a newborn pup. She lives in a cave high above the water, her heads reaching down like lines from a fisherman’s rod, and she eats whatever swims near, dolphins and men alike.

Her parentage is the one thing Homer leaves unsettled. Later writers gave her a sea-god father, Phorcys or Triton, some said the monster Typhon, and for a mother the witch-goddess Hecate or the sea crone Craeteis. The family is a map of the old deep sea, all teeth and darkness.

The Nymph and the Poison

Roman poetry rewrote her into a woman. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Scylla was once a beautiful nymph walking the shore at twilight, and the sea god Glaucus, still dripping from his transformation, fell in love with her on sight. Glaucus went to the sorceress Circe for a potion to win her. Circe wanted Glaucus for herself. So instead of a love potion she poured poisons into the cove where Scylla bathed, and when the girl waded into the water, her lower body was a ring of snapping dogs before she understood what had happened. The monster is, in this telling, a woman punished for being desired. Another tradition makes the jealous one Amphitrite, wife of Poseidon, and the poison poured into Scylla’s spring for the same reason.

The Price of the Strait

In the Odyssey the choice is laid out cold by Circe before Odysseus even sails. The strait has two gates. On one side Scylla, on the other Charybdis, the whirlpool that swallows the sea three times a day. A ship that dodges the whirlpool drifts into range of the cliff. Odysseus, who has lost men to every shore so far, does the arithmetic and aims closer to the rock. Six men, one per head, and the rest sail on.

Did You Know?

Homer gives Scylla the voice of a dog. The word for her cry is the yelping of a newborn pup, the last sound anyone would expect from a six-headed devourer, as if the poet wanted the monster heard before it was seen, and heard as something small and lost.

The ancients, true to their habits, eventually explained her out of the myth. Scylla, they noted, could just be a rock or a reef in the Strait of Messina, where the currents are cruel and the coast is stone. The monster and the whirlpool gave names to real water that sank real ships.

Scylla is the choice itself made flesh. She does not chase, does not scheme, does not even hate, she is simply there, on one side of a passage every sailor must make, and her presence forces the decision that defines a commander: which loss do you pay. The phrase that survives her is not about her at all. It is about the two gates and the ship between them.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

Homer, Odyssey, Book 12
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 13-14
Apollodorus, Epitome
Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’

Primary Sources

Homer, Odyssey, Book 12
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 13-14
Apollodorus, Epitome
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Scylla and Charybdis'

Protections

Odysseus steers closer to Scylla's rock than to the whirlpool, choosing to lose six men rather than the whole ship

Related Beings

Cannibal

Night Terror

Common Questions

What is Scylla?

Scylla is a sea monster of Greek myth, a supernatural woman with six heads on long snaky necks and twelve feet. She lived in a cave overlooking a narrow strait and devoured anything that passed within reach. In the Odyssey she snatches six of Odysseus’s men from the deck, one for each head.

How did Scylla become a monster?

Homer does not say. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses she was originally a beautiful nymph loved by the sea god Glaucus. When Glaucus asked the sorceress Circe for help winning her, Circe fell in love with him herself and poisoned the water where Scylla bathed, turning her into the monster. Another version blames Amphitrite.

Why did Odysseus sail toward Scylla?

Because the alternative was worse. Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis sat on opposite sides of a strait, so any ship had to pass within reach of one or the other. Odysseus steered closer to Scylla and lost six men, rather than risk losing the whole ship to the whirlpool.

Was Scylla a real place?

The ancients themselves rationalized her as a rock or reef in the Strait of Messina, where currents make navigation genuinely dangerous. The monster gave poetic form to the real hazards of the western Mediterranean as Greek sailors first entered it.

What does between Scylla and Charybdis mean?

It is a proverb for a choice between two dangers, in which avoiding one brings you within reach of the other. It comes directly from the strait where the two monsters sat so close that no ship could pass without risking at least one.