Aeaea

Also Known As: Greek Aiaie, Αἰαίη; Latin Aeaea; the island of Circe, later identified with the Circaean promontory in Latium
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: It is the one landfall in the Odyssey where a crew can rest, and the one from which a living man can set out for the country of the dead.
Role in Mythos: Home and workshop of the goddess Circe, the hinge on which the whole homeward voyage turns, and the last solid ground before the Ocean stream.
Relation to Humans: Sailors reach it half dead and blown off course, and what they get there is a hot meal, a transformation, a year of comfort and a set of directions nobody else in the poem can supply. Getting away again requires asking.

They came in on the oars in dead silence, into a harbour some god must have shown them, and lay on the beach for two days and two nights without doing anything at all. Grief and exhaustion had taken the crew apart. On the third morning Odysseus took a spear and went inland to see what kind of country he had come to, and on the way back down he put a bronze point through the spine of a stag so heavy he had to lash its feet together and carry it slung across his neck, leaning on the spear, because the animal was too big to sledge over one shoulder. The men on the shore came out of their blankets and stared at it. They ate all day, and afterwards they slept on the sand with the surf going, and that was the last easy thing that happened there.

What he had actually seen from the high ground was worse than nothing. The island was low and ringed with sea, crowned with scrub oak and thicket, and out of the middle of it, through the trees, a single thread of smoke was rising off somebody’s hearth. He came back and told them where they were, which was the problem, because he could not tell them where they were. His speech on the beach is one of the strangest things in the poem: he says plainly that they do not know where the darkness lies or where the dawn, nor where the sun that lights the world goes down under the earth, nor where it comes up. Grown seamen sat and wept.

Homer never resolves it. Odysseus has sailed west and north for weeks, and yet when the ship finally leaves this island the poem says it is putting out from the place where early Dawn keeps her house and her dancing floors, and where the sun itself rises. The island sits at the eastern edge of the world and is reached by going the other way. Two of the oldest lines about Aeaea say something the rest of the geography cannot accommodate, and nobody in antiquity managed to argue them into agreement.

Inland from the harbour the ground opens into a clearing, and in the clearing stands a hall built of dressed stone, low and solid, with a doorway that faces the light. Wolves and mountain lions lie about on the flagstones outside. They do not hunt. They get up on their hind legs when strangers come and press against them with their tails going, fawning like household dogs, because they are not animals, they are the last few centuries of visitors. Through the wall comes a woman’s voice singing over the click of a great loom.

The island belonged to Circe before any of this, and it belonged to her by delivery. Her brother Aeetes, who kept the golden fleece at the far eastern end of the world in a country called Aea, tells the Argonauts that he once rode in their father Helios’s own chariot when the sun took his sister west and set her down on the Tyrrhenian shore. The two names sit awkwardly close on purpose. Aea in the east, Aeaea in the west, one family split across the whole width of the map, both halves living in a house the sun can reach in a morning.

Aeaea is the only place in the Odyssey that gives anything away for free, and even then the price is a year. Meat and sweet wine every day for twelve months, and when the crew finally took Odysseus aside and reminded him that he had a country, Circe let him go and told him where to go first, which was down. From this island, and only from this island, a living man is told how to reach the house of Hades, and given the black ewe and the ram and the shape of the pit and the words. He sailed to the world’s edge, spoke with the dead, and then came back to Aeaea, because it is also the place you return to.

The return is what left a mark on the ground. A young crewman called Elpenor, no great fighter and not clever, had slept off the wine on the roof of Circe’s hall and woken to the noise of the crew leaving, and had gone straight over the edge instead of down the ladder and broken his neck at the base of the spine. He was still lying there unburied when they got back from the dead, where his ghost had asked them, in front of everyone, not to leave him like that. So they carried him out to the headland where the land runs furthest into the sea, burned him with his armour, heaped a mound, dragged a pillar up onto it and planted his oar upright in the top. It is the one piece of human building on the island, and it was put there by men who had been pigs a fortnight earlier.

Jason and Medea landed on the same beach with blood on them after they killed her brother, and Circe cut the throat of a suckling pig over their hands and let it run. The island does purification too. It just does not do forgiveness; she worked out what they had actually done and ordered them off.

The Romans decided they knew where it was. Aeaea became the Circaean promontory on the coast of Latium, a headland that rises out of flat marsh and open water so abruptly that from a ship it reads as an island, and in the age of the Pontine marshes it very nearly was one. Virgil has Aeneas’s fleet slip past it at night on a wind Neptune sent, close enough to hear cedar burning in a proud house, a shuttle humming, and behind that lions roaring against their chains, boars, caged bears and the shapes of wolves. Strabo, writing prose, records what was actually up there in his own day: a small town, a temple of Circe, an altar of Athena, and a bowl the locals would bring out and tell you had belonged to Odysseus.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Aeaea in Greek mythology?

Aeaea is the island home of the goddess Circe in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus and his crew land there after escaping the Laestrygonians, and it is where Circe turns part of his company into swine before becoming his ally. The island is also the place from which Odysseus sets out to consult the dead.

Where is Aeaea located?

Homer’s geography is contradictory and never resolved. Odysseus sails west to reach it, yet the Odyssey describes the island as the place where Dawn keeps her house and dancing floors and where the sun rises, which puts it in the east. Later Roman writers, including Virgil and the geographer Strabo, identified it with the Circaean promontory on the coast of Latium, the modern Monte Circeo.

Who lives on Aeaea?

Circe lives there, in a hall of dressed stone in a wooded clearing near the middle of the island. The wolves and mountain lions that fawn on visitors outside her door are earlier travellers she transformed. The Odyssey also gives her a household of four nymph attendants born of the springs, groves and rivers.

Why is Aeaea important in the Odyssey?

It is the turning point of the whole voyage. Odysseus and his crew get their only real rest there, a full year of it, and Circe gives him the instructions for reaching the house of Hades and questioning the ghost of Tiresias. On his return she supplies the sailing directions for the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis and the cattle of the Sun.

What happened to Elpenor on Aeaea?

Elpenor, the youngest of Odysseus’s crew, fell from the roof of Circe’s hall on the morning they left and broke his neck. His body was still unburied when the crew came back from the land of the dead, where his ghost had begged them to bury him. They burned him on the island’s furthest headland and raised a mound with his oar planted upright on top.