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Circe’s Instructions to Odysseus (OD. 10.507–40) As an Early Sibylline Oracle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2019

Christopher A. Faraone
Christopher A. Faraone*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago*
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Abstract

Scholars have noted that Circe’s instructions to Odysseus illustrate a speech type-scene comprised of directions and then instructions – or ‘map’ and ‘script’: first she tells him (i) how to get to the entrance to Hades and then (ii) what rituals to do and what words to say after he gets there (Od. 10.507–40). This essay argues that the Odyssey poet is, in fact, using the vocabulary and syntax of an important subset of this speech-act: hexametrical oracles, as we see them quoted a few centuries later by Herodotus and parodied by Aristophanes. Her advice, moreover, also echoes closely a specific kind of Archaic oracle that directed Greek colonists to a far-away place and that was typical of the female prophets called ‘Sibyls’, who lived near the Aegean coastline in places where the Homeric poems were originally composed and performed.

Keywords

CirceOdysseusoracleSibylcolonizationTiresiasinstructions
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 139 , November 2019 , pp. 49 - 66
Copyright
© The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

*

cf12@uchicago.edu. This essay first took shape preparing for a graduate seminar that I taught on hexametrical genres at the University of Chicago in 2012 and I am grateful to a wonderful group of graduate students for their comments and critique. I presented evolving versions of the paper at the Society of Biblical Literature Meeting in San Antonio in 2016, in 2017 in Paris at the seminar of François de Polignac – at which I was especially helped by the comments of Piero Pucci, Renaud Gagné and John Scheid – and more recently in March 2018 at the Australian National University in Canberra at the invitation of Elizabeth Minchin, whom I thank for her insightful comments, and in March 2019 at the University of Southern California. Thanks also to Radcliffe Edmonds and two anonymous readers for their comments on the written version. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Odyssey are my own.