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Blogging The Odyssey: Part 7 (The Worst Ways to Die in Greek Mythology)

Last time on Blogging The Odyssey, Odysseus went to the underworld and a bunch of dead people complained in his general direction.

Odysseus has made some mistakes. No one’s saying otherwise. He blinded a Cyclops, he invoked the wrath of Poseidon, and remember that time he got distracted by a sexy sea-witch for an entire year? (Full disclosure, he also stole some cheese.) But by far his biggest mistake was hiring his crew. They are incompetent morons, all of them, and they are clearly thirsting for death.

Look, I gave Odysseus A LOT of crap last week. I was feeling bad for his men. I could only assume that after everything Odysseus had put them through, what was left of their number had decided to get one of these deals going:

NBC

But now I’m thinking the crew is just as much to blame as Odysseus. Take Eurylochus, for example. At one point in the chapter, this guy says:

All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals,
true, but to die of hunger, starve to death—
that’s the worst of all.

Had you asked me to list off all the worst ways to die in ancient Greece, “starvation” would not even have cracked my top fifty. Scylla was pecked to death by an eagle! Medea set Creusa’s dress on fire! And did Eurylochus forget about that little field trip we all took to Cannibal Island? There are upwards of a billion worse ways to die, and a bunch of them happen right here in Book 12: The Cattle of the Sun. For instance…

1. Lured to your death by the song of the Sirens. Odysseus continues on with his story. He tells us that, having returned from the underworld, he and his crew then sailed back to Circe. She promised to tell him how to get home to Ithaca, which was nice of her—the problem is that she gave him way too many instructions. Sail past the Sirens; hang a left at Charybdis, the giant whirlpool, but watch out for Scylla, the violent sea monster; if you hit the River Styx, you’ve gone too far. I’m the kind of person who needs Google Maps to drive two blocks in any direction, lest I take a wrong turn and wind up in another dimension.

First up: the Sirens. The Sirens are fearsome because they seduce men with their song, falsely promising to give them whatever they want most. Thankfully, nobody in Odysseus’s crew was killed, but if I’m being honest it wasn’t for lack of trying.

What Circe said: Well, Odysseus, if you want to hear the Sirens’ song, just have your men stuff their ears full of beeswax and shackle you to the mast of the ship. You’ll get to hear the song; they’ll keep rowing no matter what. Still a bit of a risk, though, to tell you the truth.
What Odysseus heard: YOU MUST HEAR THE SONG OF THE SIRENS. IT’S A FATE THING, BECAUSE YOU, ODYSSEUS, ARE SPECIAL.

Anyway. Onto the next.

2. Crushed to death by self-aware boulders. Once they made it past the Sirens, the crew was faced with a choice. Here’s what Circe had to say on the subject:

CIRCE: After the Sirens, you’ll hit a fork in the road, and each option is equally terrible.
ODYSSEUS: Okay.
CIRCE: So first we’ve got the Clashing Rocks, which are like two big cliffs that smash together whenever anybody tries passing through. No one’s ever escaped them, actually. It’s a literal death sentence.
ODYSSEUS: Wow. Yikes. What’s the second option?
CIRCE: You’ll have to navigate the passage between two sea monsters; one is a giant whirlpool and the other has six heads. That one will eat six of your men, but you’ll probably make it through just fine.
ODYSSEUS: So you’re saying we have a choice between everyone dying and only six of us dying.
CIRCE: I cannot advise you any further. I cannot tell you which path is better.
ODYSSEUS: I can tell you which path is better. Mathematically, one of those is definitely better.
CIRCE: Yeah, I guess we’ll never know.

3. Swallowed up by a whirlpool. Surprise: Odysseus went with the second option. Charybdis, the whirlpool, was largely a nonissue. They were able to steer clear of her completely.

4. Just straight-up EATEN by a sea monster. HOWEVER, they only managed to avoid Charybdis because they were sailing so close to the six-headed Scylla—thus the idiom “between Scylla and Charybdis,” which is a lot like “between a rock and a hard place,” which in this case reads more like “between a rock and a hard place and a place that’s objectively not as hard.”

Odysseus attempted to put up a fight, but six of his men were devoured regardless, which is, you know, a shame.

5. Drowning at sea, because you were an IDIOT and you COMPLETELY DESERVED IT. Much as it pains me to say so, Odysseus did all he could to prevent this from happening.

Remember that time the prophet Tiresias told Odysseus not to eat the cows of the Sun God, or else everyone would die horribly? Well, Odysseus remembered. He explained this to his whole idiot crew. In fact, he warned them multiple times. Unfortunately, they wound up stranded on the Sun God’s island, and at first things were fine; they made do with their own provisions. After a month, however, Eurylochus decided to make this whole “give me sirloin steak or give me death” speech to the rest of the crew, and they slaughtered the cows while Odysseus was sleeping.

Helios, the Sun God, heard what happened and whined about it to Zeus. Zeus was like, “Fine, I’ll take care of it,” and as soon as they set sail, he “hit their racing ship with a white-hot bolt,” and tore it “into splinters.” Everyone drowned, except for Odysseus, who just barely survived. It was at this point that he washed ashore on Calypso’s island, now a broken man, just like the Cyclops said he would be.

Fox

Odysseus has finished telling the tale of what happened to him. Time to get back to our regularly scheduled programming of Man vs. A Bunch of a Lazy Suitors Who Are Eating All of His Food and Lusting After His Wife. Stay tuned!

Discussion questions:

  1. What would the song of the Sirens sound like to you? (Mine would be the Lizzie McGuire Movie soundtrack on an eternal loop, but that’s just me.)
  2. What is the worst way to die in Greek mythology? I’m partial to “getting the Sphinx’s riddle wrong,” but there’s something to be said for the iron bed of Procrustes.
  3. Let’s talk about why both sea monsters are personified as women. This was ancient times, sure, but it kind of makes me think of how hurricanes were namely exclusively after women until 1978.

Looking for the rest of our Blogging the Classics series? Check it out here! For all of Blogging The Odyssey, click here!