SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS  . In

Homer (Od. xii . 73, 235, 430) Scylla is a dreadful sea-monster, daughter of Crataeis, with six heads, twelve feet and a voice like the yelp of a puppy . She dwelt in a sea-cave looking to'the west, far up the face of a huge cliff . Out of her cave she stuck her heads, fishing for marine creatures and snatching the seamen out of passing ships . Within a bowshot of this cliff was another lower cliff with a great fig-tree growing on it . Under this second rock dwelt Charybdis, who thrice a day sucked in and thrice spouted out the sea water . Between these rocks Odysseus sailed, and Scylla snatched six men out of his ship . In later classical times Scylla and Charybdis, whose position is not defined by Homer, were localized in the Straits of Messina—Scylla on the Italian, Charybdis on the Sicilian side (Strabo i. p . 24; vi. p . 268) . The well-known line, Incidis in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim, occurs in the Alexandreis of Gautier de Lille, a poet of the 12th century .

In 1 This Heracleides is noticed in an

Egyptian papyrus containing a fragment of the historian Sosylus, which alludes, by way of comparison, to the tactical ability displayed by him at the battle of Artemisium (Wilcken in Hermes, xli., 1906, pp . 103 seq.) . Ovid (Metam. xiv . 1-74) Scylla appears as a beautiful maiden beloved by the sea-god Glaucus and other deities, and changed by the jealous Circe (or other rival) into a sea-monster; after-wards she was transformed into a rock shunned by fishermen . According to a late legend (Servius on Aeneid, 420), Charybdis was a voracious woman who robbed Heracles of his cattle and was therefore cast into the sea by Zeus, where she retained her old voracious nature . In later poetry and art Scylla was conceived of as a maiden above, with dogs' or wolves' heads growing out of her body, and the tail of a fish . Another Scylla, confounded. by Virgil (Eel. vi . 74) with the sea-monster, was a daughter of Nisus (q.v.), king of Megara . See O . Waser, Skylla and Charybdis in der Literatur and Kunst der Griechen and Romer (1894); and D . Jobst, Skyll¢ and Charybdis (Wurzburg, 1902), who endeavours to show that the Homeric description really referred, as the ancients assumed, to the Sicilian straits .