Characters
- Circe — enchantress; drugs the cup; wand; swine-herder of men
- Eurylochus — cautious deputy; refuses to enter; reports back
- Odysseus’s crew — drink; become swine in mind-kept bodies
- Telemachus — absent at the first approach; later rescuer
- Wolves and lions — fawning outer victims of her drugs
Places
- Circe’s house — loom, doors, pigsties
- Circe’s land — Circe’s island
- Forest path — route of Eurylochus’s party
Themes
Narrative
On Aeaea Odysseus splits his men; he stays with one group while Eurylochus leads twenty-two to Circe’s house in the forest clearing. Mountain wolves and lions fawn like dogs—victims of her drugs. Within, Circe sings at the loom; the men call; she opens the bright doors and invites them. All enter except suspicious Eurylochus. She seats them, mixes cheese, barley, honey, and Pramnian wine with baleful drugs so they might forget their native land, then strikes them with her wand and pens them in the pigsties. They take on the heads, voice, bristles, and shape of swine, but their minds remain as before; she throws them mast, acorns, and cornel fruit, food of wallowing pigs.
Eurylochus returns alone to report the disappearance (he did not see the change itself, only that they vanished within). The swine-metamorphosis is the poem’s clearest Circean outrage against guest-friendship and bodily form—undone later only when Odysseus, protected by Hermes’ moly, makes her swear and restore them. Catalogue the transformation as its own atom.