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CIRCE

Madeline Miller

Last accessed on Wednesday November 10, 2021

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Aeëtes did not look at me while I told him about Prometheus. His mind worked best, he always said, without distractions. His eyes were fixed on the horizon.

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That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

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“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.”

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those years I had spent with them were like a stone tossed in a pool. Already, the ripples were gone.

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I know what an unfit husband I make, for I am happiest when my hands are busy at my work, and then I come home late and filthy.” “Witchcraft and invention have that in common,”

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Tell me, what do you think would happen if I did not make monsters and poisons? Minos does not want a queen, only a simpering jelly he keeps in a jar and breeds to death. He would be happy to have me in chains for eternity, and he need only say the word to his own father to do it. But he does not. He knows what I would do to him first.”

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had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

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“Your wife sounds like a clever woman.” “She is. I cannot account for the fact that she married me, but since it is to my benefit, I try not to bring it to her attention.”

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Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

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“After Achilles died, Agamemnon named me Best of the Greeks. Other men fought bravely, but they flinched from war’s true nature. Only I had the stomach to see what must be done.” His chest was bare and hatched with scars. I tapped it lightly, as if sounding what lay within. “Such as?” “You promise mercy to spies so they will spill their story, then you kill them after. You beat men who mutiny. You coax heroes from their sulks. You keep spirits high at any cost. When the great hero Philoctetes was crippled with a festering wound, the men lost their courage over it. So I left him behind on an island and claimed he had asked to be left. Ajax and Agamemnon would have battered at Troy’s locked gates until they died, but it was I who thought of the trick of the giant horse, and I spun the story that convinced the Trojans to pull it inside. I crouched in the wooden belly with my picked men, and if any shook with terror and strain, I put my knife to his throat. When the Trojans finally slept, we tore through them like foxes among soft-feathered chicks.”

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He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.

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Fill your men’s ears with wax, and leave your own free. If you tie yourself to the mast, you may be the first man to ever hear their song and tell the tale. Would

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Do not listen to your enemy, Odysseus had once told me. Look at them. It will tell you everything.

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She was not angry. Her absence was only that old trick Hermes had spoken of: turn your back on a favorite and drive him to despair. Then return in glory, and revel in the groveling you will get.

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Athena had no babe, and she never would. Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.

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He said that it must be sudden. If a scab is to come off, he said, the best way is quickly.

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He could not imagine the scope of gods, the mercilessness that comes of seeing generations rise and fall around you.

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For sixteen years, I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him stand over the stove while I spoke the words of power. He should understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping.

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“What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?” He’d smiled in the firelight. “That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.”

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Odysseus had endless patience for Agamemnon’s caprice, but with those beneath him he could be harsh as winter storms. It made him weary, all the ignorance in the world. So many stubborn wills that must be harnessed again and again to his purpose, so many foolish hearts that had to be led daily away from their hopes to his. No mouth could carry all that persuasion. There must be shortcuts, and so he found them. It might even have been a pleasure of sorts, to squash some little complaining soul who dared to stand in the way of the Best of the Greeks.

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“I had hoped…” He trailed off, but the rest was clear. What do children always hope? To make their parents shine with pride. I knew how painful the death of that hope could be.

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I could imagine Odysseus sighing and holding out his empty hands. Such is the commander’s lot. Such is the folly of humanity. Is it not our human tragedy that some men must be beaten like donkeys before they will see reason?

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Each man or woman who passed, she knew their history and would tell it to me, for she said that you must understand people if you would rule them.”

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But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

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When he was back on Ithaca he was never content, always looking to the horizon. Once we were his again, he wanted something else. What is that if not a bad life? Luring others to you, then turning from them?”

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I watched him from my window and remembered a story he’d told me once about a great serpent that the men of the north believe in, which yearns to devour all the world.” I remembered that story too. In the end, the serpent ate itself.

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“Gods pretend to be parents,” I said, “but they are children, clapping their hands and shouting for more.”

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My past was not some game, some adventure tale. It was the ugly wrack that storms left rotten on the shore. It was as bad as Odysseus’.

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“Hermione. She screamed for half a decade but grew up sweet as anything. I worried that Telemachus did not scream enough. That he was well behaved too soon. I was always curious how a second child might have been different.

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He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.

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“I do not plan to tell her. Telegonus, these are gods. You must keep your tricks close or you will lose everything.”

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He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

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