Every Monster in The Odyssey, Explained
The rose-fingered dawn of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is finally breaking, and fans of the Oscar-winning director are flocking to cinemas in droves.
Homer’s 3000-year-old tale exploring timeless themes of homesickness, loyalty, and hubris has been kept alive through countless retellings over the ages, but what really makes the story memorable are the immense obstacles Odysseus faces on his long journey home. Some of these obstacles are gods and goddesses, but many are terrifying monsters.
From the Cyclops to Scylla and Charybdis, The Odyssey has quite the rogues’ gallery of dangerous creatures. Let’s find out more about the monsters of The Odyssey, and their place in this iconic story.
The Lotus-Eaters
After leaving Troy, Odysseus and his crew find themselves blown off course, landing on the island of the Lotus-eaters. While the Lotus-eaters living there are neither physically scary nor violent, they are rendered blissfully apathetic by their continuous munching of the Lotus flower.
While some of the men try the flower and lose all desire to return home or leave the island, Odysseus forces them back on their ship and hastily sets sail.
Historians believe that the Lotus-eaters’ island is the isle of Jerba, off the coast of Tunisia, and that the plant they were eating was either an opium poppy or jujube, which causes forgetfulness.
Either way, the Lotus-eaters have since become a cautionary tale against becoming so consumed by present pleasure that you lose sight of everything and everyone you loved before trying the flower.
Cyclops (Polyphemus)
After leaving the Lotus-eaters' island, Odysseus and his men land on the Island of the Cyclopes. These one-eyed giants usually live undisturbed by humans as they peacefully tend to their flocks of sheep, but—as Odysseus and his men tragically discover—it turns out they have quite the appetite for human flesh.
When Odysseus and his hungry men happen upon the Cyclops Polyphemus’s cave, they help themselves to some of his food. But when Polyphemus returns home with his flock and catches them, he throws all the rules of good hospitality out the window and happily eats several of them.
Odysseus, cunning as he is, manages to keep a level head and introduces himself as “Nobody”, convincing Polyphemus to drink enough wine to fall into a drunken sleep. Then he and his men sharpen a wooden stake and drive it into the Cyclops’s eye, blinding him. They then proceed to sneak out of the cave tied to the undersides of the sheep, so as not to be caught by Polyphemus as he blindly searches for them at the entrance.
Their escape seems to have gone quite well—until Odysseus’s hubris gets the better of him. He can’t help but shout his real identity to Polyphemus as they sail away, and although they miss the boulder he launches at them, they definitely don’t miss the subsequent curse. Unfortunately for them, Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, god of the sea. He asks his father to avenge him, and Poseidon obliges, doing everything he can to stop Odysseus from ever reaching Ithaca. Nice one, Odysseus!
The Laestrygonians
After Odysseus gets the help of the god of the winds, Aeolus, in harnessing the power of the West Wind to help bring him home, it seems like he might have succeeded in evading Poseidon’s curse. But just off the coast of Ithaca, his men—believing there to be treasure inside—decide to open the leather sack containing all the unfavourable winds, blowing them far, far away again.
The closest landmass they find is the territory of the Laestrygonians. Odysseus sends a few men ashore to scout the area, but what they find is a true horror show. The Laestrygonians turn out to be man-eating giants, and after some of the crew make it back to the boats to alert the rest, the Laestrygonian king Antiphates sends the entire giant population down to shore to launch massive boulders at the ships. They destroy all but Odysseus’s vessel, and drag the men from the water to eat for dinner.
The Sirens
After Odysseus and his crew manage to extricate themselves from the goddess Circe’s house and survive a trip to the underworld to hear the prophecy of Tiresias, they finally set sail again. Before leaving, Circe warns Odysseus about the Sirens. Although their physical form isn’t described, in pop culture they are often depicted as beautiful women. Their deadliest feature is their song, which will transfix anyone who hears it, holding them captivated as they waste away on the island.
Odysseus, keen to hear the song, stops all his crew’s ears with beeswax and asks them to strap him to the boat as they sail past the isle of the Sirens. For once, all goes to plan, and they all make it past the island alive—until they reach the next monster…
Scylla & Charybdis
While they make it past the Sirens, Odysseus and the crew meet their worst enemies yet at their next location: Scylla and Charybdis. These two horrible monsters live on both sides of an enormous crag that the ship must pass through to sail on to Ithaca.
Scylla is a twelve-legged monster with six heads, full of razor-sharp teeth—an absolute delight! To make matters worse, although she makes quiet yelping sounds, she is much more lethal than her calls suggest, using her heads to grab prey out of the water at lightning speed.
Charybdis is another giant monster that lives inside the sea right next to the other crag. She opens her mouth wide, making a whirlpool that sucks everything in three times a day, and also vomits up from the whirlpool three times a day.
As you can imagine, that’s a near-impossible situation to get through—and our adventurers don’t. Only Odysseus survives the ordeal by clinging to a fig tree until Charybdis’s mouth vomits up some shards of his ship and closes it. He is then able to drift along until he ends up on the isle of the nymph Calypso.
