Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses

Circe sits on a bronze throne, raises the drugged cup in one hand and her wand in the other, and looks straight at you — because you are standing where Ulysses stands. His reflection appears in the round mirror behind her. At her feet, next to the incense burner, a pig snuffles: one of his transformed crew.

Waterhouse builds the whole picture around the offer. The throne's lion arms, the scattered herbs, and the mirror all frame a simple question: drink or don't. Ulysses, protected by a magic herb from Hermes, will drink and stay 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.

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917) was a British painter who carried the Pre-Raphaelite love of myth and legend to the end of the Victorian age. He returned again and again to enchantresses and doomed heroines, painted with soft realism and theatrical staging.