What does “between Scylla and Charybdis” mean?

A monster and a whirlpool

Forget the two rocks of the popular picture. Homer’s strait is two cliffs a bowshot apart. The taller one has a cave so high that no archer could send an arrow into it, and there lives Scylla: twelve feet, six enormously long necks, and on each neck a head with three rows of teeth. Her voice, Homer says, sounds like a young hound’s yelp, and her name sounds like the Greek skylax, a puppy. Under a fig tree on the lower cliff lies Charybdis, who sucks the sea down three times a day and vomits it up again. One danger picks men off the deck. The other can swallow the whole ship.

Circe’s hard advice

Odysseus hears about the strait on Circe’s island, the night before he sails. He asks whether he could dodge the whirlpool and fight the monster off. Circe scoffs at him: “you are always wanting to fight somebody or something.” Scylla is not mortal, she says, and nobody beats her. Her answer is arithmetic:

you must hug the Scylla side and drive ship by as fast as you can, for you had better lose six men than your whole crew.

If the ship is over Charybdis while she sucks, Circe adds, not even Poseidon could save it. Odysseus keeps the worst to himself. Once he is past the Sirens, he warns the crew about the whirlpool and says nothing about Scylla, knowing they would stop rowing.

Six men for one ship

He disobeys Circe in one thing: he puts on his armor, takes two spears and stands at the bow, watching the cliff. He never sees her. Every other eye is on Charybdis, which drains the sea until black sand shows on the bottom. Then Scylla’s heads dart down and take six of his best men, who call his name as they go. Odysseus remembers it as the worst thing he saw on all his travels. The ship gets through at exactly the price Circe named. Later, alone after the wreck off the Sun’s island, he drifts back into the same strait and survives Charybdis by hanging from her fig tree until his broken mast spins back up.

A real strait

Later Greeks put the place on the map. Around 400 BC the historian Thucydides wrote that the narrow sea between Messina and Reggio, where Sicily almost touches the toe of Italy, was the Charybdis of the story, and blamed its fierce currents. The tides of the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas meet there, and its eddies worried sailors for centuries. On the Calabrian shore, the town of Scilla still carries the monster’s name.

What it means today

In English the phrase means a choice between two dangers, where steering away from one brings you closer to the other. By Shakespeare’s day it was familiar enough for a joke: in The Merchant of Venice, printed in 1600, the clown Launcelet tells Jessica, “when I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis your mother.” A plainer cousin is “between a rock and a hard place.” Homer’s version is harsher than either. Odysseus does not escape the dilemma; he chooses which loss to take, and lives with it.