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30-444: The idiom " between Scylla and Charybdis " has come to mean being forced to choose between two similarly dangerous situations. The sea monster Charybdis was believed to live under a small rock on one side of a narrow channel. Opposite her was Scylla , another sea monster, who lived inside a much larger rock. The sides of the strait were within an arrow-shot of each other, and sailors attempting to avoid one of them would come in reach of

60-517: A "monster" is subjective; further, some sea monsters may have been based on scientifically accepted creatures, such as whales and types of giant and colossal squid . Sea monster accounts are found in virtually all cultures that have contact with the sea. For example, Avienius relates of Carthaginian explorer Himilco 's voyage "...there monsters of the deep, and beasts swim amid the slow and sluggishly crawling ships." (lines 117–29 of Ora Maritima ). Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed to have encountered

90-466: A Greek equivalent. After relating the Homeric account and reviewing other connected uses, he went on to explain that the proverb could be applied in three different ways. In circumstances where there is no escape without some cost, the correct course is to "choose the lesser of two evils". Alternatively it may signify that the risks are equally great, whatever one does. A third use is in circumstances where

120-408: A ferryman by telling him a myth concerning Charybdis. With one gulp of the sea, she brought the mountains to view; islands appeared after the next. The third is yet to come and will dry the sea altogether, thus depriving the ferryman of his livelihood. Between Scylla and Charybdis Being between Scylla and Charybdis is an idiom deriving from Greek mythology , which has been associated with

150-566: A likeness of Jefferson Davis . A shield emblazoned "Neutrality" hangs on the ship's thwarts, referring to how Palmerston tried to maintain a strict impartiality towards both combatants in the American Civil War . American satirical magazine Puck also used the myth in a caricature by F. Graetz, dated November 26, 1884, in which the unmarried president-elect Grover Cleveland rows desperately between snarling monsters captioned "Mother-in-law" and "Office Seekers". Victor Hugo uses

180-472: A lion-like monster with "glaring eyes" on his return voyage after formally claiming St. John's, Newfoundland (1583) for England. Another account of an encounter with a sea monster comes from July 1734. Hans Egede , a Dano-Norwegian missionary, reported that on a voyage to Godthåb on the western coast of Greenland he observed: a most terrible creature, resembling nothing they saw before. The monster lifted its head so high that it seemed to be higher than

210-527: A metaphor for being in a dangerous relationship; this is reinforced by a later mention of the similar idiom of "the devil and the deep blue sea." American heavy metal band Trivium also referenced it in "Torn Between Scylla and Charybdis," a track from their 2008 album Shogun , in which the lyrics are about having to choose "between death and doom." In 2014 Graham Waterhouse composed a piano quartet titled Skylla and Charybdis . According to his programme note, its four movements "do not refer specifically to

240-541: A person has gone too far in avoiding one extreme and has tumbled into its opposite. In this context Erasmus quoted another line that had become proverbial, incidit in Scyllam cupiēns vītāre Charybdem (into Scylla he fell, wishing to avoid Charybdis). This final example was a line from the Alexandreis , a 12th-century Latin epic poem by Walter of Châtillon . The myth was later given an allegorical interpretation by

270-430: A rock with Scylla facing her directly on another rock, making a strait. In some myths, Charybdis was a voracious woman who stole oxen from Heracles , and was hurled by the thunderbolt of Zeus into the sea, where she retained her voracious nature. Odysseus faced both Charybdis and Scylla while rowing through a narrow channel. He ordered his men to avoid Charybdis, thus forcing them to pass near Scylla, which resulted in

300-513: A sea monster. Through the descriptions of Greek mythical chroniclers and Greek historians such as Thucydides , modern scholars generally agree that Charybdis was said to have been located in the Strait of Messina , off the coast of Sicily and opposite a rock on the mainland identified with Scylla. A whirlpool does exist there, caused by currents meeting, but it is dangerous only to small craft in extreme conditions. Another myth makes Charybdis

330-738: A village in crisis, people starving in the home they made for themselves on the southeastern coast of Alaska. Other reports are known from the Pacific , Indian and Southern Oceans (e.g. see Heuvelmans 1968). Cryptozoologists suggest that modern-day sea monsters are surviving specimens of giant marine reptiles, such as an ichthyosaur or plesiosaur , from the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, or extinct whales like Basilosaurus . Ship damage from Tropical cyclones such as hurricanes or typhoons may also be another possible origin of sea monsters. In 1892, Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans , then director of

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360-604: The Nereid Thetis to guide them through the perilous passage. In the Aeneid , the Trojans are warned by Helenus of Scylla and Charybdis, and are advised to avoid them by sailing around Pachynus point ( Cape Passero ) rather than risk the strait . Later, however, they find themselves passing Etna , and have to row for their lives to escape Charybdis. Aristotle mentions in his Meteorologica that Aesop once teased

390-609: The Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria , on the Italian mainland. Scylla was rationalized as a rock shoal (described as a six-headed sea monster) on the Calabrian side of the strait and Charybdis was a whirlpool off the coast of Sicily. They were regarded as maritime hazards located close enough to each other that they posed an inescapable threat to passing sailors; avoiding Charybdis meant passing too close to Scylla and vice versa. According to Homer's account, Odysseus

420-504: The crow's nest on the mainmast . The head was small and the body short and wrinkled. The unknown creature was using giant fins which propelled it through the water. Later the sailors saw its tail as well. The monster was longer than our whole ship. Ellis (1999) suggested the Egede monster might have been a giant squid . There is a Tlingit legend about a sea monster named Gunakadeit (Goo-na'-ka-date) who brought prosperity and good luck to

450-550: The Chilean sea shore in July 2003. It was first described as a "mammoth jellyfish as long as a bus " but was later determined to be another corpse of a sperm whale . Cases of boneless, amorphic globsters are sometimes believed to be gigantic octopuses , but it has now been determined that sperm whales dying at sea decompose in such a way that the blubber detaches from the body, forming featureless whitish masses that sometimes exhibit

480-517: The French poet Barthélemy Aneau in his emblem book Picta Poesis (1552). There one is advised, much in the spirit of the commentary of Erasmus, that the risk of being envied for wealth or reputation is preferable to being swallowed by the Charybdis of poverty: "Choose the lesser of these evils. A wise man would rather be envied than miserable." Erasmus too had associated the proverb about choosing

510-660: The Japanese trawler Zuiyō Maru off New Zealand caused a sensation in 1977 and was immortalized on a Brazilian postage stamp before it was suggested by the FBI to be the decomposing carcass of a basking shark . Likewise, DNA testing confirmed that an alleged sea monster washed up on Newfoundland in August 2001, was a sperm whale . Another modern example of a "sea monster" was the strange creature washed up in Los Muermos on

540-682: The Royal Zoological Gardens at The Hague , saw the publication of his The Great Sea Serpent , which suggested that many sea serpent reports were best accounted for as a previously unknown giant, long-necked pinniped . It is likely that many other reports of sea monsters are misinterpreted sightings of shark and whale carcasses (see below), floating kelp , logs or other flotsam such as abandoned rafts, canoes and fishing nets. Sea monster corpses have been reported since recent antiquity (Heuvelmans 1968). Unidentified carcasses are often called globsters . The alleged plesiosaur netted by

570-400: The allusion to falling from Scylla into Charybdis. The story was often applied to political situations at a later date. In James Gillray 's cartoon, Britannia between Scylla and Charybdis (3 June 1793), " William Pitt helms the ship Constitution , containing an alarmed Britannia, between the rock of democracy (with the liberty cap on its summit) and the whirlpool of arbitrary power (in

600-422: The daughter of Poseidon and Gaia and living as a loyal servant to her father. Charybdis aided her father Poseidon in his feud with her paternal uncle Zeus and, as such, helped him engulf lands and islands in water. Zeus, angry over the land she stole from him, sent her to the bottom of the sea with a thunderbolt; from the sea bed, she drank the water from the sea thrice a day, creating whirlpools. She lingered on

630-413: The deaths of six of his men. Later, stranded on a raft, Odysseus was swept back through the strait and passed near Charybdis. His raft was sucked into her maw, but he survived by clinging to a fig tree growing on a rock over her lair. On the next outflow of water, when his raft was expelled, Odysseus recovered it and paddled away safely. The Argonauts were able to avoid both dangers because Hera ordered

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660-638: The equivalent French idiom ( tomber de Charybde en Scylla ) in his novel Les Misérables (1862), again in a political context, as a metaphor for the staging of two rebel barricades during the climactic uprising in Paris . The first chapter of the final volume is titled "The Charybdis of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Scylla of the Faubourg du Temple ." James Joyce uses the idiom to frame

690-456: The events in Episode 9 of Ullysses (1922). In Nicholas Monsarrat 's 1951 war novel The Cruel Sea , upper-class junior officer Morell is teased by his middle-class peer, Lockhart, for his condescending assumption that Lockhart wouldn't understand the cultural allusion. In the world of music, the second line of The Police 's single " Wrapped Around Your Finger " (1983) uses the idiom as

720-657: The lesser of two evils, as well as Walter of Châtillon’s line, with the Classical adage. A later English translation glossed the adage's meaning with a third proverb, that of "falling, as we say, out of the frying pan into the fire, in which form the proverb has been adopted by the French, the Italians and the Spanish." Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable also treated the English proverb as an established equivalent of

750-405: The other. To be " between Scylla and Charybdis " therefore means to be presented with two opposite dangers, the task being to find a route that avoids both. Three times a day, Charybdis swallowed a huge amount of water, before belching it back out again, creating large whirlpools capable of dragging a ship underwater. In some variations of the story, Charybdis was simply a large whirlpool instead of

780-500: The protagonists or to events connected with the famous legend"; they reflect images "conj[u]red up in the composer's mind during the writing". Sea monsters Sea monsters are beings from folklore believed to dwell in the sea and are often imagined to be of immense size. Marine monsters can take many forms, including sea dragons , sea serpents , or tentacled beasts. They can be slimy and scaly and are often pictured threatening ships or spouting jets of water. The definition of

810-511: The proverbial advice " to choose the lesser of two evils ". Several other idioms such as " on the horns of a dilemma ", "between the devil and the deep blue sea", and "between a rock and a hard place" express similar meanings. The mythical situation also developed a proverbial use in which seeking to choose between equally dangerous extremes is seen as leading inevitably to disaster. Scylla and Charybdis were mythical sea monsters noted by Homer ; Greek mythology sited them on opposite sides of

840-529: The shape of an inverted crown), to the distant haven of liberty". This was in the context of the effect of the French Revolution on politics in Britain. That the dilemma had still to be resolved in the aftermath of the revolution is suggested by Percy Bysshe Shelley 's returning to the idiom in his 1820 essay A Defence of Poetry : "The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and

870-463: The vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism." A later Punch caricature by John Tenniel , dated 10 October 1863, pictures the prime minister Lord Palmerston carefully steering the British ship of state between the perils of Scylla, a craggy rock in the form of a grim-visaged Abraham Lincoln , and Charybdis, a whirlpool which foams and froths into

900-469: Was advised to pass by Scylla and lose only a few sailors, rather than risk the loss of his entire ship in the whirlpool. Because of such stories, the bad result of having to navigate between the two hazards eventually entered proverbial use. Erasmus recorded it in his Adagia (1515) under the Latin form of evitata Charybdi in Scyllam incidi (having escaped Charybdis I fell into Scylla) and also provided

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