The Adventures of Ulysses

When Ulysses leaves Circe, she cries so hard that her tears pour into the sea and erupt as a freshwater fountain. Ulysses tells his wife Penelope this story while disguised as an old beggar who claims to have heard the fountain tale when he was at sea. Penelope likes this story, though it suggests that her husband dallied with another woman during his wanderings.

The moly is a flower given by Hermes to Ulysses to protect him from the drugs in Circe’s meals, potions that already have turned several of his men into pigs. As long as he grasps the flower, he’ll be immune to the drugs’ effects. Hermes tells him to eat her food and drink, then surprise her by grabbing her and demanding protection. Hermes warns Ulysses that the flower protects only against the drugs and cannot protect him from her psychic magic, which will bend him to her will, and he must act quickly, before the magic takes full effect. Ulysses employs the flower successfully and convinces Circe to promise not to harm him, but he falls under her spell, and they live together for a long time.

Ulysses’s ships are long, slender, and black, with 40 oars and a prow shaped into a brass spearpoint for ramming and sinking other ships. The vessels provide the warriors’ passage home from Troy. There’s room onboard for three days’ food and water but little room for treasure won in battle. Ulysses lives under a curse that forces his ships to wander; the food is soon gone and the treasure lost. Two ships are smashed by giants while on Cannibal Beach; the third journeys all the way to the underworld and back but is destroyed during a storm sent by Poseidon. Ulysses acquires a boat from Calypso and continues his homeward path, but this boat, too, is sunk. Alcinous, king of Phaeacia, sends Ulysses home to Ithaca in a ship whose sailors later get turned to stone, a punishment from Poseidon for aiding Ulysses.