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The Strait of Messina: Homer’s Charybdis
By Peter Nichols — Spring 2006
Now wailing in fear,
we rowed up those straits,
Scylla to starboard,
dreaded Charybdis off to port,
her horrible whirlpool gulping
the sea-surge down, down
––The Odyssey, by Homer
I spent a summer in my early twenties aboard a yacht cruising across much of the Mediterranean. Lying in a net beneath the bowsprit, with the waves of Homer’s “wine-dark sea” passing beneath me, I read E.V. Rieu’s prose translation of The Odyssey, including the lines above. I also read volumes of sailing directions that suggested as an afterthought that many of the numerous islands, harbors, and headlands I was visiting might well be the locations of certain episodes from The Odyssey. The high cliffs of the narrow entrance to Bonifacio Harbor in Corsica could be where Odysseus was ambushed by the Laestrygonians; Jerba, off the Tunisian coast, might be the land of the Lotus Eaters. Well, were they or weren’t they? I wanted to know.
You can almost navigate by the descriptions provided in The Odyssey. The details of wind, wave, weather, and harbors are frequently as specific as the entry and exit wounds gorily described in The Iliad.
Many theories have been advanced for the route taken by Odysseus in his ten-year-long journey home to Ithaca from Troy after the Trojan War. Some are preposterous, while many of Homer’s descriptions closely fit numerous Mediterranean locations.
Odysseus’ course took him between the dreaded whirlpool of Charybdis that lay at one side of a narrow strait, opposite the equally dreadful, six-headed, man-gobbling monster Scylla. She (the females in The Odyssey are all pretty frightening) lived in a cave from which her heads—“each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset, packed tight”—shot out to scoop up “any dolphin or swordfish she may catch, or any larger monsters.”
The Strait of Messina, lying between Sicily and the Italian mainland, has from earliest recorded time been one of the richest fishing—including swordfishing—grounds in the Mediterranean. Tidal action in this inland sea is scarcely noticeable, but the strait has two distinct semidiurnal tides: two high and two low waters in each lunar day.
This incessant back-and-forth rushing of water over an irregular bottom through a two-mile-wide channel has attracted an abundance of sea life—enough even for voracious Scylla—and produces whirl-pools in fixed spots several times a day. These were more powerful in Homer’s time.
After an earthquake changed the sea floor in the strait in 1783, the sucking pools were not as violent, but in the 19th century still able to whirl a 74-gun man-of-war around. In 1975, abreast of the fishing port of Scilla on the mainland, I was at the helm of an 85-foot ketch running under power when it twirled around on the boiling surface of a whirlpool like a paper boat going down a drain. Nothing I did with the wheel made any difference. The south-flushing tide carried the boat sideways and then backwards across the disturbance; I corrected my course in smooth water beyond it.
No other spot in the Med so perfectly answers the geography, and relative positions of each to the other, of Scylla and Charybdis. It has always been taken as the location for this episode in Homer’s story. In the early 5th century B.C., the Greek historian Thyucidides wrote: “The strait that lies between Rhegium (Reggio) and Messana (Messina) ... is the so-called Charybdis through which Odysseus is said to have sailed.”
The fascinating question is: How true is the story? Forgetting that impossible termagant, Scylla, archaeology has proved the astonishing accuracy of folk tales and oral tradition in transmitting down the ages fact behind what might otherwise be dismissed as myth. If you cruise through the Strait of Messina, you are traveling in Odysseus’ certain wake, into whatever truth lies behind Homer’s epic.
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