Scylla and Charybdis

In ancient Greek myth, the sea monster Scylla, together with her counterpart Charybdis, stands out as that rare monster undefeated by a god or male hero. This chapter surveys her deployment in Graeco-Roman antiquity, with special focus on her indomitable status. It discusses the epic narrative first attested in the Odyssey and the visual trope of Scylla as a dog-belted, mermaid-like hybrid creature, and it identifies key factors in her development in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, including her rationalization, rhetoricization, and the emergence of a metamorphosis story that constructs her as a victim. Taken together, the argument demonstrates that despite sometimes significant differences across her manifestations, Scylla’s defining combination of dog, female, and sea elements plays up and intertwines at least two elemental fears that touch on basic aspects of male identity: the fear of being eaten and the fear of emasculation.