Why did Circe turn Odysseus’s men into pigs?

Circe’s island

With one ship left after the Laestrygonians, Odysseus lands on Aeaea, the island of Circe, a goddess, daughter of the Sun and sister of King Aeetes (Odyssey 10.135–139). Lots send Eurylochus ahead with twenty-two men. In the forest they find a house of polished stone, and round it mountain wolves and lions that fawn on them like dogs. Homer says she had tamed them with her drugs (10.212–213), and he leaves us to wonder who they were before. Inside, a woman sings at a loom and invites them in. Only Eurylochus, suspicious, stays outside.

The cup and the wand

She seats them and serves cheese, barley meal and honey stirred into Pramnian wine, with a drug mixed in. Homer gives its purpose in a single line, which Butler renders “to make them forget their homes” (10.236). Then a stroke of her wand, and she pens them in her sties.

They were like pigs, head, hair, and all, and they grunted just as pigs do; but their senses were the same as before, and they remembered everything.

That is the horror of the scene. The men weep inside the bodies of pigs while she tosses them acorns. Why does Circe do it? The poem says no more than the drug’s purpose, and the purpose is telling. Forgetting home is what the lotus did to his scouts (who the lotus-eaters were). On this voyage, the deepest danger is to stop wanting Ithaca.

Hermes and moly

Odysseus sets out alone. On the path the god Hermes meets him, disguised as a young man, and pulls a plant out of the ground for him.

The root was black, while the flower was as white as milk; the gods call it Moly, and mortal men cannot uproot it, but the gods can do whatever they like.

With moly, Hermes says, her drug will fail. When she strikes him with her wand, he must draw his sword as if to kill her, then make her swear the great oath of the gods to plot no more harm against him (10.277–301). What plant moly was has puzzled readers ever since. Homer gives only its black root, its milk-white flower and its name among the gods.

The oath and the year

It goes as Hermes said. The cup does nothing, the sword comes out, and Circe falls at his knees: you must be Odysseus, whom Hermes always said would come. She calls him polytropos, the man of many turns, the word of the poem’s first line (10.330). She swears. He refuses to eat until his men are free, so she rubs a second drug on them, and they come out younger, taller and handsomer than before (10.393–396).

Then danger turns into comfort. They feast on Aeaea for a full year, until the crew themselves take him aside: “Sir, it is time you began to think about going home” (10.467–474).

Why she sends him to the dead

Circe lets them go, but she sends them to another guide first. Only one ghost can tell Odysseus the way: Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, whose mind Persephone left whole even in death, while the other dead are only drifting shades (10.490–495). So the road home runs through the land of the dead. When Odysseus comes back to bury Elpenor, she also warns him about the Sirens and Scylla.

Homer’s Circe is dangerous first and generous after, and later artists keep returning to her. John William Waterhouse painted her offering the cup (1891), and Madeline Miller’s novel Circe (2018) tells the story from her side.