Circe

by Madeline Miller

All who were wise feared the god Apollo’s wrath, silent as sunlight, deadly as plague.

“Most men do not know me for what I am.” “Most men, in my experience, are fools,”

“It was your father who suggested it. My vessels must have prophecy in their blood. You should be honored,” he said. “You have borne a vision of Apollo.”

When he was gone, would I be like Achilles, wailing over his lost lover Patroclus?

It was an old saying: weaving at another woman’s loom is like lying with her husband. I watched to see if Penelope would flinch.

“Odysseus drew the world to him,” she said. “Telegonus runs after, shaping as he goes, like a river carving a channel.”

There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us.