Circe

by Madeline Miller

Whatever made the prince Telemachus so sweet, I thought, it must have come from Penelope. This was the child I deserved.

His mortality was always with me, constant as a second beating heart. Now that he could sit up, reach and grasp, all the ordinary objects of my house showed their hidden teeth. The boiling pots on the fire seemed to leap for his fingers. The blades slipped from the table a hairsbreadth from his head. If I set him down, a wasp would come droning, a scorpion scuttle from some hidden crevice and raise its tail. The sparks from the fire always seemed to pop in arcs towards his tender flesh. Each danger I turned aside in time, for I was never more than a step from him, but it only made me more afraid to close my eyes, to leave him for an instant. The woodpile would topple on him. A wolf who had been gentle her whole life would snap. I would wake to see a viper reared over his crib, jaws wide. It is a sign, I think, of how addled I was with love and fear and no sleep, that it took me so long to realize: that stinging insects should not come in battalions, and ten falling pots in a morning was beyond even my tired clumsiness. To remember how, in the long agony of my labor, Eileithyia had been kept from me. To wonder if, thwarted, the god that had done it might try again.

With Telegonus still bound against me, I climbed to the highest peak, a bare strip of rock beneath the hanging sky. I set my feet upon the stone. “Athena would kill my child, and so I defend him,” I cried. “Be witness now to the power of Circe, witch of Aiaia.”

Yet a strange thing happened when I began to recite them back to Telegonus. I found myself hesitating, omitting, altering. With my son’s face before me, their brutalities shone through as they never had before. What I had thought of as adventure now seemed blood-soaked and ugly. Even Odysseus himself seemed changed, callous instead of unflinching. The few times I did leave a story as it was, my son would frown. You did not tell it correctly, he said. My father would never have done such a thing.

Telegonus would beam. “I knew he was an honorable man. Tell me more of his noble deeds.” And so I would spin another lie.

Athena could not cross my spell, no, she had no powers in the underworld. But he walked everywhere. When he was not rolling his dice, he led the spirits to the doors of Hades himself. God of meddling, god of change.

“Tell me,” I said. “What does all-knowing Hermes say about his sister who wants you dead? About the fact that you will be killed the moment you step away from the island?” He nearly sighed. “Mother, it was so long ago. Surely she has forgotten.” “Forgotten?” My voice clawed the cave walls. “Are you an idiot? Athena does not forget. She will eat you in one gulp, like an owl takes a stupid mouse.” His face paled, but he pressed on like the valiant heart he was. “I will take my chances.” “You will not. I forbid it.” He stared at me. I had never forbidden him anything before. “But I must go to Ithaca. I have built the ship. I’m ready.” I stepped towards him. “Let me explain more clearly. If you leave, you will die. So you will not sail. And if you try, I will burn that boat of yours to cinders.” His face was blank with shock. I turned and walked away.

I could taste the venom in my mouth. It was a pleasure to see him frightened at last. “You think that will stop me? You have never understood how strong I am.”

I had not told him of his infancy, how angry and difficult it was. I had not told him the stories of the gods’ cruelty, of his own father’s cruelty. I should have, I thought. For sixteen years, I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him stand over the stove while I spoke the words of power. He should understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping.

I had painted his history in bright, bold colors, and he had fallen in love with my art. And now it was too late to go back and change it.

Beneath them was the place I truly dwelt, a cold eternity of endless grief.

Under other circumstances, I would have laughed. It was an old saying: weaving at another woman’s loom is like lying with her husband.

It made a good tale: the suitors, lazy and cruel, besieging the faithful wife, threatening the loyal heir. They had earned their punishment by all the laws of gods and men, and Odysseus came like Death himself to deal it, the wronged hero making the world right.

It was a shock to hear such blunt words put into Odysseus’ mouth. There was a piece of me that wanted to object, say that it didn’t sound like him. But how many times had I heard him praise such tactics? The only difference was how plainly Telemachus told it. I could imagine Odysseus sighing and holding out his empty hands. Such is the commander’s lot. Such is the folly of humanity. Is it not our human tragedy that some men must be beaten like donkeys before they will see reason?

He smiled at me. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that Achilles went to war at seventeen? And he was not the youngest man at Troy. Boys of thirteen, fourteen, all did themselves proud in the field. I’ve found that courage is not a matter of age, but true-made spirits.’” He did not imitate his father, not exactly. Yet the rhythm of the speech caught Odysseus’ confidential, luring mildness. “He meant I was a disgrace, of course. A coward. I should have fought off the suitors single-handedly. Was I not fifteen when they first came? I should have been able to shoot his great bow, not just string it. At Troy I would not have lived a day.”

When he had lived with me, I’d smoothed all those things away, wrapping him in my magic and divinity. Perhaps it was why he had been so happy. An idyll, I had called our time. Illusion might have been a better word.

“And so,” he said, “which do you change, and which do you let go?” “I change them all,” I said. “They have come to my house. Why should I care what is in their hearts?” He had smiled and lifted his cup to me. “Lady, you and I are in accord.”

He had stood on the beach looking at Telegonus and believing him a pirate. He had stood in his hall and accused Telemachus of conspiracy. Two children he had had, and he had not seen either clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

Not even Odysseus could talk his way past witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.

“Calypso fawned over him, and you turned his men to pigs. Yet you were the one he preferred. Do you think that strange?”

The words seemed to echo in the quiet air. Telemachus was silent, as if waiting for the sound to fade. At last he said, “It was a bad life.” “There are many who are unhappier.” “No.” His vehemence startled me. “I do not mean a bad life for him. I mean that he made life for others a misery. Why did his men go to that cave in the first place? Because he wanted more treasure. And Poseidon’s wrath that everyone pitied him for? He brought it on himself. Because he could not bear to leave the cyclops without taking credit for the trick.”

“You take me for a fool. A dupe to be led by the nose. Asking so sweetly about my spell. Tell me which of the gods pursues you. Whose wrath have you brought upon my head?”

“I am from Sparta. We know about old soldiers there. The trembling hands, the startling from sleep. The man who spills his wine every time the trumpets blow. My husband’s hands were steady as a blacksmith’s, and when the trumpets sounded, he was first to the harbor scanning the horizon. The war did not break him; it made him more himself. At Troy he found at last a scope to equal his abilities. Always a new scheme, a new plot, a new disaster to avert.”

Even Aeneas, that Trojan refugee, had founded a city.

I remembered that story too. In the end, the serpent ate itself.

In that eerie light, the bones of Penelope’s face showed fine as one of Daedalus’ statues. I had wondered why she was not more jealous of me. I understood now. I was not the goddess who had taken her husband.

Our eyes met across the air. Far away, my hands were peeling pomegranates for dinner.

My throat had gone dry. What was the fool doing? The last man who refused Athena was Paris, prince of Troy. He had preferred the goddess Aphrodite, and now he was dead and his city ash.

He would not ask where, he would not even wonder. So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

She tipped the contents, felt their weight. A faint smile touched her lips. “You may remember I have some experience in handling unwelcome guests.”

“I am sorry,” I said. “I could not believe that any in this world would refuse her divinity.” “That is amusing coming from you.”

Their gratitude was simple and plain, and ours was the same. No one knelt.

“I have long wondered something,” I said. “When we fought over Athena, how did you know to kneel to me? That it would shame me?” “Ah. It was a guess. Something Odysseus said about you once.” “Which was?” “That he had never met a god who enjoyed their divinity less.”

I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.

Circe has had a long literary life, inspiring writers such as Ovid, James Joyce, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Atwood.

Ancient epic almost exclusively features male protagonists, and the few women who appear are there mostly as cameo helpmeets, breeding stock, or obstacles to be overcome; their stories matter only in how they touch the hero’s. I wanted to flip the script, to make Odysseus the cameo and Circe the epic hero.

For me, the Greek gods reflect what happens to humans when we see only ourselves and our own needs. The great gods have such infinite power and resources that they have forgotten what it’s like to want, to suffer, to show empathy, to face all of life’s minor inconveniences. They have forgotten what it’s like to be told no, and it has turned them into monsters, obsessed with dominance and hierarchy, always trying to claw a little higher. The frightening thing is how real this phenomenon is. I see the gods as a cautionary tale.