![]() ![]() Lamia herself has her eye on a delicious fellow and, as the beautiful woman she has been transformed into, she seduces him and they live a solitary life together until one day he says that they really ought to marry. The clue to whether the love is reciprocated is in the fact that the nymph has hidden from him. Ah ha! She persuades Hermes to return her to human form and in exchange she will reveal the hiding place of a nymph with whom he’s fallen madly in love. This beautiful woman, Lamia, starts the poem as a snake. Waterhouse’s painting references a poem by Keats. What are the snakes all about? That’s a fair question. The model was Rubens’ second wife Helen Fourment who was 37 years his junior and to his evident delight, very happy to pose nude. ![]() Why? Because Glaucus is irresistible to at least one lady in this story! Circe doesn’t get her man, however, she gets exiled instead and wreaks havoc elsewhere.Ĭirce isn’t in this image but here is the lovely Scylla who looks as though she’s just taken all her unruly dogs for a walk by the sea wearing only a transparent wisp of material and hopefully a lot of SPF 50. But what does Circe do instead? She gives him a draft that turns Scylla into a monster. Glaucus was extremely interested in her, however, oh yes! So much so that he went to the witch Circe to ask her make him a love potion to give to Scylla. This is Glaucus, at least as Rubens imagined him, and I find it very hard to believe that Scylla wasn’t interested but she wasn’t. The truth is that she did absolutely nothing wrong except attract the wrong man. Let’s go back to the story of Scylla because you would imagine that she must have done something truly horrific to have such a grim destiny. The Strait of Messina is, by the way, extremely dangerous so who knows, perhaps the legends were created to fit the geography rather than the other way round?! Controversial! You have to love the fact that the remaining men simply seem mildly curious at the fate of their fellow sailors. Unfortunately, six of Odysseus’s men were lost to her as we see here. Her monstrosity took the form of six ravenous heads that yapped like dogs and had three rows of sharp teeth to tear apart any sailor that came within reach. Scylla may have had an even more dramatic and terrible transformation as she was a beautiful nymph, possibly or possibly not the daughter of Lamia, who got herself turned into a terrible monster, destined to be trapped in the rocks opposite Charybdis. ![]() As Charybdis’s punishment, she was turned into a monster that would eternally swallow sea water, creating whirlpools. No one wants the wrath of Zeus because he’s nothing if not inventive. Charybdis is depicted on the bottom right of the fresco and was thought to be the daughter of Poseidon, the Sea God, and Gaia, the Earth Goddess, which is funny because I always thought of her as a man she definitely looks like an old man here.Īs with many stories in Greek mythology, Charybdis had a better start in life which, thanks to Zeus, has now somewhat gone down the drain.īeing the daughter of Poseidon, she was closer to him than she was to her uncle Zeus and so when Poseidon requested that she help him increase the size of his realm by flooding large areas of land with seawater, she acquiesced only to incur the wrath of Zeus. ![]()
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