Before she was a six-headed terror snatching sailors off the deck, Scylla was a water nymph bathing in a quiet spring near the Strait of Messina. This episode reconstructs her biography from the contradictory ancient genealogies, some naming Hecate or Typhon and Echidna as parents, through Ovid’s account of the fisherman-turned-sea-god Glaucus, the sorceress Circe’s jealous poisoning of her bathing pool, and the body horror of dog heads erupting from her own flesh.

We then examine her encounter with Odysseus, who must silently sacrifice six men to her rather than lose his whole ship to Charybdis, and her death at the hands of Heracles and resurrection by fire. Ancient rationalizers get their turn, too, recasting her as a Tyrrhenian pirate ship, a courtesan with a gang of wild dogs, a dogfish, or a jagged reef, before Renaissance and Romantic painters like Rubens, Turner, and Waterhouse return to the tragedy of her transformation.

• Why Greek lineage worked as a genre label telling audiences how to feel about a story
• Why Circe punished the innocent nymph instead of the man who rejected her
• The rowing mechanics that forced Odysseus to hide the danger from his crew
• John Keats’s sanitized retelling in Endymion, complete with a crystal palace and a happy reunion
• What euhemerist fact-checking misses about the emotional truth of a myth