Odyssey: A Daily Odyssey through Homer’s The Odyssey
Sep 2, 2026 · 10 min · 5 segments
Foreknowledge does not spare the blow. Some losses come without warning — and cannot be fought. In *The Odyssey*, Book 12, Odysseus keeps silent about Scylla, fearing that terror would paralyze…
Landon SolanoHost
But of Scylla I told them nothing more, a bane none might deal with, lest happily my company should cease from rowing for fear and hide them in the hold.
But I did at my glorious harness, and caught up two long lances in my hands, and went on the decking of the prow, for thence me thought that Syla of the rock would first be seen, who was to bring woe on my company.
Yet I could not spot her anywhere, and my eyes waxed weary for gazing all about toward the darkness of the rock.
Next we began to sail the narrow strait lamenting, for on the one hand lay Syla, and on the other the mighty Charybdis, in terrible wise sucked down the salt sea water.
As often as she belched it forth, like a cauldron on a great fire, she would seethe up through all her troubled deeps.
But oft as she gulped down the salt sea water, within she was all plain to see through her troubled deeps.
And the rock around roared horribly, and beneath the earth was manifest swart with sand.
Toward her then we looked fearing destruction, but Scylla meanwhile caught from out my hollowed ship six of my company, the hardiest of their hands and the chief in might, and looking into the swift ship to find my men, even then I marked their feet and hands as they were lifted on high.
and they cried aloud in their agony, and called me by my name for that last time of all.
Even as when as a fisher on some headland lets down with a long rod his baits for a snare to the little fishes casting into the deep the horn of an ox of the homestead, and as he catches each flings it writhing ashore.
And there she devoured them, shrieking in her gates, and they stretching forth their hands to me in the dreft dead struggle.
And the most pitiful thing was this, that mine eyes have seen of all my travail in searching out the paths of the sea.
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But of Scylla I told them nothing more, a bane none might deal with, lest happily my company should cease from rowing for fear and hide them in the hold.
But I did at my glorious harness, and caught up two long lances in my hands, and went on the decking of the prow, for thence me thought that Syla of the rock would first be seen, who was to bring woe on my company.
Yet I could not spot her anywhere, and my eyes waxed weary for gazing all about toward the darkness of the rock.
Next we began to sail the narrow strait lamenting, for on the one hand lay Syla, and on the other the mighty Charybdis, in terrible wise sucked down the salt sea water.
As often as she belched it forth, like a cauldron on a great fire, she would seethe up through all her troubled deeps.
But oft as she gulped down the salt sea water, within she was all plain to see through her troubled deeps.
And the rock around roared horribly, and beneath the earth was manifest swart with sand.
Toward her then we looked fearing destruction, but Scylla meanwhile caught from out my hollowed ship six of my company, the hardiest of their hands and the chief in might, and looking into the swift ship to find my men, even then I marked their feet and hands as they were lifted on high.
and they cried aloud in their agony, and called me by my name for that last time of all.
Even as when as a fisher on some headland lets down with a long rod his baits for a snare to the little fishes casting into the deep the horn of an ox of the homestead, and as he catches each flings it writhing ashore.
And there she devoured them, shrieking in her gates, and they stretching forth their hands to me in the dreft dead struggle.
And the most pitiful thing was this, that mine eyes have seen of all my travail in searching out the paths of the sea.
