Power, Fear, and Self-Preservation Theme Analysis

I had heard by then the stories whispered among my cousins, of what [mortals] might do to nymphs they caught alone. The rapes and ravishments, the abuses. I found it hard to believe. They looked weak as mushroom gills. They kept their faces carefully down, away from all those divinities. Mortals had their own stories, after all, of what happened to those who mixed with gods. An ill-timed glance, a foot set in an impropitious spot, such things could bring down death and woe upon their families for a dozen generations.

It was like a great chain of fear, I thought. Zeus at the top and my father just behind. Then Zeus’ siblings and children, then my uncles, and on down through all the ranks of river-gods and brine-lords and Furies and Winds and Graces, until it came to the bottom where we sat, nymphs and mortals both, eying each other.

I was too wild to feel any shame. It was true. I would not just uproot the world, but tear it, burn it, do any evil I could to keep Glaucos by my side. But what stayed most in my mind was the look on my grandmother’s face when I’d said that word, pharmaka. It was not a look I knew well, among the gods. But I had seen Glaucos when he spoke of the levy and empty nets and his father. I had begun to know what fear was. What could make a god afraid? I knew that answer too.

A power greater than their own.

[Glaucos] pushed me from him. His face was caught, half in anger, half in a sort of fear. He looked almost like his old self […]

“No!” He slashed his hand through the air. “I will not think on those days. Every hour some new bruise upon me, some new ache, always weary, always burdened and weak. I sit at councils with your father now. I do not have to beg for every scrap. Nymphs clamor for me, and I may choose the best among them, which is Scylla.”

My face was hot. “I suppose I should take you as my tutor and deny everything?”

“Yes,” [Aeëtes] said. “That is how it works, Circe. I tell father that my sorcery was an accident, he pretends to believe me, and Zeus pretends to believe him, and so the world is balanced. It is your own fault for confessing. Why you did that, I will never understand.”

It was true, he would not. He had not been born when Prometheus was whipped.

Witchcraft is nothing but such drudgery […] Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? Why did none of us mind?

I cannot speak for my brothers and sister, but my answer is easy. For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay.

Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.

“Tell me,” he said, “who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one?”

“A happy one, of course.”

“Wrong,” he said. “A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.” […]

“So this is how Olympians spend their days. Thinking of ways to make men miserable.”

“There’s no cause for righteousness,” he said. “Your father is better at it than anyone.”

“You fools,” I said. “I am the one who made that creature. I did it for pride and vain delusion. And you thank me? Twelve of your men are dead for it, and how many thousands more to come? That drug I gave her is the strongest I have. Do you understand, mortals?” […]

The light from my eyes beat down upon them.

“I will never be free of her. She cannot be changed back, not now, not ever. What she is, she will remain. She will feast on your kind for all eternity. So get up. Get up and get to your oars, and let me not hear you speak again of your imbecile gratitude or I will make you sorry for it.”

The cringed and shook like the weak vessels they were, stuttering to their feet and creeping away […] I yanked off the cloak. I wanted the sun to burn me.

“I am no child to him. I was his to dispose of, like his seed-warriors or his fire-breathing bulls. Like my mother, whom he dispatched as soon as she bore him an heir. Perhaps it might have been different if I’d had no witchcraft. But by the time I was ten I could tame adders from their nests, I could kill lambs with a word and bring them back with another. He punished me for it. He said it made me unmarketable, but in truth, he did not want me taking his secrets to my husband.”

From time to time the wood buckled and a pig escaped. Most often, he would throw himself from the cliffs […] If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man.

When I passed back by the pen, his friends would stare at me with pleading faces. They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

How would you know? I wanted to say. Often those men in most need hate most to be grateful, and will strike at you just to feel whole again.

You were ready to fight me to have it. Not if I am willing?

My stomach churned against itself. “Please. Do not make me do this.”

Make you? Child, you have come to me […]

I lifted the blade, touched its tip to the creature’s skin. It tore as flowers tear, ragged and easy. The golden ichor welled up, drifting over my hands. I remember what I thought: surely, I am condemned for this. I can craft all the spells I want, all the magic spears. Yet I will spend the rest of my days watching this creature bleed […]

The darkness around us shimmered with clouds of his gilded blood. Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought I cannot bear this world a moment longer.

Then, child, make another.

“You pity me. Do not. My father lied about many things, but he was right when he called me a coward. I let him be what he was for year after year, raging and beating the servants, shouting at my mother, and turning our house to ash. He told me to help him kill the suitors and I did it. Then he told me to kill all the men who had aided them, and I did that too. Then he commanded me to gather up all the slave girls who had ever lain with one of them and […] kill them as well.” […]

“I hanged them” […] Each word was like a blade he thrust into himself. “I had never seen it done […] I had some thought that it must be more proper. I should have used the sword instead. I have never known such ugly drawn-out deaths. I will see their feet twisting the rest of my days.”

An owl passed its wings over my head. I heard the sound of scuffling brush, the beak snap, A mouse had died for its carelessness. I was glad Telemachus would not know of those words between me and his father. At the time I had been boasting, showing off my ruthlessness. I had felt untouchable, filled with teeth and power. I scarcely remembered what that was like.

With every step I felt lighter […] I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

Telemachus slept on […] So often on Aiaia, I had wondered how it would feel to touch him.

His eyes opened as if I had spoken the words aloud. They were clear as they always were.

I said, "Scylla was not born a monster. I made her."

His face was in the fire's shadows. "How did it happen?"

There was a piece of me that shouted its alarm: if you speak he will turn gray and hate you. But I pushed past it. If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing. I told him the whole tale of it, each jealousy and folly and all the lives that had been lost because of me.