Scylla: From Horror to Hybrid

Natalie Lawrence
Jul 27
4 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Part 4 of my Odyssey Monsters: Afterlives series, tracking their evolutions across art and literature.

Previous posts: Polyphemus, The Laestrygonians, The Sirens | Next up: Charybdis

Scylla. Detail from side A from a Boeotian red-figure bell-crater, 450–425 BC

Scylla may not enjoy the fame of Medusa or the Minotaur, but her legacy survives in one familiar expression. The phrase ‘between Scylla and Charybdis’, means a choice between two equally dangerous alternatives.

Scylla also underwent one of the most dramatic transformations in Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey, she is an ancient sea monster: a terrible creature with six ravenous heads lurking in a cave above the waves. By the Roman period, she had become a beautiful sea nymph transformed by jealousy into a hybrid horror. In art, she often appeared with the tail of a fish, helping to shape the visual tradition from which medieval mermaids would eventually emerge.

The insatiable snatcher

Scylla first appears in Book 12 of the Odyssey, when Circe warns Odysseus about the perils awaiting him in the narrow strait between Italy and Sicily. On one side lies Charybdis, the vast whirlpool capable of swallowing an entire ship. On the other lurks Scylla.

Homer’s description is deliciously grotesque. She has twelve feet, six impossibly long necks and six fearsome heads, each packed with rows of sharp teeth. From her cave high in the cliffs she reaches down to seize dolphins, seals and passing sailors.

Circe offers Odysseus little comfort. Scylla cannot be escaped: the only option is to sail past as quickly as possible and accept that six men will die. Better to lose part of the crew than everyone to Charybdis.

Unlike Polyphemus or the Sirens, Scylla is primarily a force of nature.

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Henri Fuseli, Odysseus in front of Scylla and Charybdis, 1794–1796

The warrior monstress

Despite Homer’s colourful eighth-century description, later artists imagined Scylla rather differently.

From the sixth century BC, Scylla usually appears as a beautiful young woman whose lower body ends in the tail of a fish and snarling dogs around her waist. The dogs preserve one small detail from Homer - Scylla’s eerie call, like barking dogs - but otherwise this is a striking reinvention. She often carries a weapon, as if she’s a warrior maiden. This hybrid Scylla might have been a goddess of fertility and the underworld for the seafaring Etruscans, and her image spread in visual culture such as earthenware and on coins.

The sea-monster Skylla. Terracotta plaque, Melos, 460–450 BC.

Ovid’s monstered maiden

The Roman poet Ovid, as with other monster-maidens, gave her a back story. In the Metamorphoses, Scylla is not born a monster. Instead, she begins life as a beautiful sea nymph. The sea god Glaucus falls desperately in love with her, but when she rejects him he turns to the sorceress Circe for help. Unfortunately for Scylla, Circe is in love with Glaucus.

Jealous and enraged, Circe poisons the pool where Scylla bathes. As Scylla enters the water, savage dogs burst from around her body. Horrified, she tries to run from them before realising they have become part of her.

It is one of Ovid’s most memorable transformations. Like Medusa before her, Scylla becomes another woman whose body is permanently transformed by lust, jealousy and revenge.

Scylla verandert door de betovering van Circe Scylla Circes veneficijs — Scylla Circes veneficijs in monstrum marinum, The Illustrated Bartsch (1606),

A monster with many meanings

As Scylla’s appearance changed, so too did what she represented. In Homer, she embodied the terrifying danger of the sea itself: one of those disasters that simply cannot be avoided. She has a dragon-like, fateful quality.

Later writers made Scylla into a threshold-dweller. Ovid's tragic victim became a monster, while artists increasingly emphasised the contrast between her beautiful upper body and monstrous lower half. The result was a creature suspended between attraction and horror, humanity and animality.

Through these later depictions, Scylla also became part of a much broader tradition of female sea hybrids whose bodies held in them the ambivalent cultural view if emale .beauty, sexuality and reproductive power, Alongside nereids and the evolving image of the Siren, her fish-tailed form helped shape the visual language from which the medieval mermaid emerged.

References

Homer. The Odyssey, Book XII, trans. Samuel Butler (c. 800 BCE).
Ovid. Metamorphoses, Book XIII (lines 898–968) and Book XIV (lines 1–74), trans. A. S. Kline.
Axel, E. (2025). Mermaids: Art, Symbolism, and Mythology. MUSE / Johns Hopkins.
Aguirre Castro, Mercedes (2002). “Scylla: Hideous Monster or Femme Fatale?” Cuadernos de Filología Clásica: Estudios Griegos e Indoeuropeos, Vol. 12, pp. 319–328.
Bain, Frederika (2023). “The Tail of Melusine: Hybridity, Mutability, and the Accessible Other.” In Melusine’s Footprint. Chapter 1. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Govers Hopman, Marianne (2012). Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Segal, Charles (1998). “Punishing the Asexual Maiden: Scylla’s Transformation as a Mechanism of Reintegrating the Sexually Disobedient Virgin into ‘a Man’s World’ (Met. 13.888–14.74).” Arethusa, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 339–371.