Scylla

Also Known As: Greek Σκύλλα; Latin Scylla; the name linked by ancient writers to skyllō, “to tear” or “to rend”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek, Roman
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A six-headed, twelve-footed sea monster who snatches sailors from the decks of ships that pass within reach of her cliff cave.
Role in Mythos: One of the paired perils of a narrow strait, set opposite the whirlpool Charybdis, so that no crew can pass without loss.
Relation to Humans: She preys on mortal sailors, plucking men off passing ships and carrying them writhing back to her lair. She cannot be fought or bargained with, only endured at the cost of a few lives.

The strait is barely a bowshot wide, and it kills you from both sides. On the Italian shore a cliff climbs into cloud, its summit lost even in clear weather, and halfway up its smooth face gapes a cave turned west toward the dark. Something lives in it. Sailors who drifted too near heard a sound like a puppy whimpering, thin and almost pitiable, and then the water below them broke apart as six long necks came down.

Homer set her here, in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, and gave her a body that reads like an inventory of nightmares. Twelve feet dangle from her, all of them misshapen. Six necks stretch out, impossibly long, each ending in a head, and each head carries three crowded rows of teeth, packed close and dark with death. Her lower half stays sunk in the hollow of the rock while the heads fish the sea beneath her, dredging up dolphins and seals and, when they come, men. Her voice is the strangest detail of all. For all her size she yelps like a newborn dog, a small ugly noise out of an enormous wreck of a thing.

Across the channel, close enough to loose an arrow to, sat the other danger. Charybdis lay under a lower rock crowned by a great wild fig, and three times a day she swallowed the black water down and three times threw it up again, a whirlpool that could pull a whole ship to the keel. Between the two there was no clean line to steer. Pull away from the sucking water and you slid under the cave. Hug the safe rock and the mouths came down. This is the passage that handed the language a phrase for every choice where both roads wound you.

Circe, who knew the water, told Odysseus plainly that there was nothing to fight there. Scylla was no mortal creature to be met with weapons, she said, but a deathless evil, and the only seamanship that mattered was to row hard past her and lose the six men she would take rather than linger and lose them all to the whirlpool. He did as he was told, and he did not tell his crew. He strapped on his armor anyway, out of the useless human instinct to do something, and kept his eyes on the far side for Charybdis. That was when she struck. Six heads, six men, lifted off the deck by their arms and legs and hauled up struggling toward the cave, calling his name as they went. He said it was the most pitiful thing his eyes had seen in all his wandering on the sea.

Where she came from depends on who is telling it. Homer names only her mother, Crataeis, and leaves the rest in shadow. Later writers rushed to fill the gap and could not agree. Apollonius, following older poets, makes her the daughter of the sea god Phorcys and the night-roaming Hecate, sometimes folding Crataeis and Hecate into a single name. Hyginus gives her the standard monster-pedigree and calls her a child of Typhon and Echidna, the same union that fathered half the beasts a Greek hero ever had to put down. Stesichorus alone names Lamia as her mother. The disagreement is a clue in itself. A creature this old had gathered parents the way a rock gathers barnacles.

Ovid told it another way, and his is the version that has haunted painters ever since. In his account Scylla began as a lovely sea nymph, courted by Glaucus, a fisherman turned sea god. She wanted nothing to do with him. Glaucus went to the witch Circe for a charm to soften her, and Circe, who wanted Glaucus for herself, took her revenge on the wrong woman. She poisoned the quiet pool where Scylla liked to bathe. Scylla waded in to her waist, felt something change below the surface, and looked down to find her hips and legs gone, replaced by a snarling girdle of dogs that were part of her now and would not stop barking. She had done nothing to earn it. The monster of the strait, in this telling, is a victim caught mid-transformation, and some later versions leave her rooted to her rock in horror until she hardens at last into the stone itself.

Not every ship was food. When the Argo came through, the Nereids passed it hand to hand across the current while Thetis herself steered, and Scylla went hungry. Aeneas, warned in advance, took the long way around Sicily rather than trust the throat of the strait at all. And there is a stray, satisfying note in Apollodorus that Heracles once killed her outright, only for her father Phorcys to burn the body and raise her again, because a thing like Scylla is too useful to the sea to be allowed to stay dead.

Her power is position and reach. She is quick where it counts, six heads striking at once across a span no single man can watch, and she is deathless, past the reach of any hero’s sword in the tellings that matter. What she is not is mobile. She is fixed to her cave, sunk to the waist in the cliff, and her hunger is bounded by what those necks can stretch to. A captain who accepts the toll survives her, which is more than the whirlpool across the water will allow. That is the grim arithmetic Circe handed Odysseus, and the meaning the strait has carried ever since. Six heads meant six men, and six men was the fare, and the ship went through.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Scylla in Greek mythology?

Scylla is a monstrous sea creature of Greek myth, described by Homer as having six long necks, six dog-jawed heads with triple rows of teeth, and twelve feet. She lives in a cliff cave above a narrow strait and snatches sailors from passing ships.

Where does Scylla live?

Scylla is said to inhabit a cave high in a cliff overlooking a narrow sea passage, traditionally identified with the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily. Directly across the channel lies the whirlpool Charybdis, so ships must pass dangerously close to one peril to avoid the other.

What is the difference between Scylla and Charybdis?

Scylla is a six-headed monster fixed to a cliff who seizes a handful of sailors from any ship that passes, while Charybdis is a whirlpool that swallows and spits out the sea three times a day and can destroy an entire vessel. Circe advised Odysseus to steer nearer Scylla and lose six men rather than risk losing his whole crew to Charybdis. The pair gave rise to the phrase “between Scylla and Charybdis,” meaning a choice between two dangers.

How did Scylla become a monster?

Homer treats Scylla as a monster by birth, the child of Crataeis. Ovid tells a different story in which she was once a beautiful sea nymph transformed by the jealous witch Circe, who poisoned her bathing pool so that her lower body became a ring of barking dogs.

Did anyone defeat Scylla?

Odysseus survived his passage but could not defeat her, losing six men to her heads. According to Apollodorus, Heracles killed Scylla during his travels, but her father Phorcys revived her with fire, and the Argonauts avoided her entirely with the help of the Nereids and Thetis.