Circe Transforming the Companions
On this drinking cup, Circe stands at the center, stirring her potion, while Odysseus' transformed companions surround her — human bodies with the heads of a boar, a ram, a wolf, and other beasts. At the edge, Odysseus rushes in with drawn sword.
The painter squeezed the whole episode — spell, transformation, and rescue — into one continuous band around a cup used at drinking parties. The joke would not have been lost on the drinkers: this is what too much of the wrong cup does to a man.
The single surviving ship reaches Aeaea, the island of Circe, a goddess and an enchantress. A scouting party finds her stone house in a clearing, guarded by wolves and mountain lions that fawn like dogs — men she has already transformed. She invites the sailors in, feeds them drugged cheese and wine, touches them with a wand, and turns them into pigs: pig bodies, human minds.
One man escapes to warn Odysseus, who goes back alone. On the way the god Hermes stops him, gives him a protective herb called moly, and tells him exactly what to do. Circe's drug fails; when she raises her wand, Odysseus draws his sword. Recognizing the man a prophecy warned her about, she restores his crew and takes him as her lover.
They stay a year, resting and feasting, until the crew reminds their captain that home still exists. Circe does not try to keep him. But she tells him the road home runs through a place no living man visits: he must sail to the edge of the world and question the dead.
This black-figure kylix was made in Athens around 550 BC. Cup painters of this period specialized in compact storytelling, wrapping entire myths around the outside of vessels meant to be turned in the hand.
