Homer’s Odyssey: Scylla and Charybdis
The Odyssey is an account of how Odysseus made his way home to his wife Penelope after the Trojan War. (The Trojan War itself was discussed in Homer’s Iliad.) At one point, Odysseus must steer his ship between two perils: a sea monster named Scylla and a whirlpool named Charybdis. The whirlpool was probably inspired by the whirlpool in the Strait of Messina, which is the narrow passage between Italy and the island of Sicily. If you try to steer well clear of the whirlpool, you might smack into the cliff. For this reason, Scylla and Charybdis became a metaphor for any situation in which you are faced with only two options, both of them bad. Odysseus is facing the dilemma that all commanders must face. He must give an order. One order would result in some of his men dying. His other option is an order that would result in everyone dying. Either way, men will die.
Here’s an English prose translation of the text: HOMER, ODYSSEY BOOK 12 – Theoi Classical Texts Library
The Iliad and Odyssey are attributed to a poet named Homer, who is often described as “the blind poet.” Yet nobody really knows if Homer was one person, two people (i.e., the Iliad and Odyssey were written by separate authors), or many people (i.e., the poems were the product of a long oral tradition). The date of the works is also unclear. Some people believed that Homer was an eyewitness to the Trojan War, whereas others think that he lived up to 500 years later. Others feel that the poems evolved through the oral tradition over centuries but were eventually written down long after the events of the Trojan War.
Many of the events in the Iliad and Odyssey are clearly mythological. Yet they were set in a context that was probably historical. In the late 19th century, a German archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann used surviving ancient place-names as a guide to find sites to excavate, to establish the historicity of the Trojan War: Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae. Although Schliemann turned out to be wrong about some things, he did make important contributions, including his insight that pottery can help one align the timelines of neighboring societies.
The Homeric epics may be telling some tales that predate even the Trojan War. Some scholars believe that the similarities between the Homeric epics and some epic poems of ancient India are evidence that both traditions drew on an older Indo-European source: (94) Homer and Indo-European Myth
The Homeric epics were written in Homeric Greek. They were in verse, in the form of dactylic hexameter, which feels like a galloping horse:
DA-duh-duh, DA-duh-duh, DA-duh-duh, DA-duh-duh, DA-duh-duh, DA
This poses a serious challenge to translators. How can they express the literal and figurative meaning of the words in a poetic rhythm that works in English? One recent translator, Emily Wilson, chose to use iambic pentameter, which is the most common meter in English poetry:
duh-DA, duh-DA, duh-DA, duh-DA, duh-DA