Glaucus and Scylla
Glaucus and Scylla
In a Nutshell
Gotta tell ya: this myth is a little creepy. It reminds us of one of those stalker movies. Check it: you've got some lonely dude (Glaucus, the immortal merman) who spies a beautiful girl (Scylla, the sea nymph) walking naked on the beach. Dude is smitten and asks a drug dealer (Circe, the sea witch) for a potion to bend the girl to his will.
Is it just us, or is this all seriously dark? By the end of the story, it gets darker still, and the pretty nymph is transformed into a man-eating monster by her stalker's obsession. Wow, it looks like the ancient Greeks were just as into intense dramas as we are today.
Yeah, it's dark. Yeah, it's creepy.
But that's what makes the tale of Glaucus and Scylla a one-hundred-and-fifty-percent must-read.
Shmoop Connections
Explore the ways this myth connects with the world and with other topics on Shmoop
Don't miss Ovid's version of the tale of Glaucus and Scylla in his famous collection of mythological poems, The Metamorphoses.We're going to go out on a limb and say that Scylla's most famous cameo in world literature comes in Homer's Odyssey, in which Odysseus decides to allow her to munch on a few of his men rather than lose his entire ship in the whirlpool, Charybdis.
A chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses called "Scylla and Charybdis." In it, Scylla is used as a metaphor for the hard and fast artistic ideal of Aristotle's view of art, while her buddy, the whirlpool Charybdis, is meant to embody Plato's idea of swirling artistic inspiration. Poor Glaucus doesn't represent anything. (Bummer.)
In Paradiso, the final book of Dante's Divine Comedy, Dante watches immortal Beatrice stare unflinchingly into the burning sun, and he compares her transformation form mortal to immortal to the metamorphosis of Glaucus into a sea god.