Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Circe, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Fear, and Self-Preservation
Women, Power, and Misogyny
Change, Initiative, and the Self
Mortality, Fragility, and Fulfillment
Family and Individuality
Summary
Analysis
Circe’s trip back to Aiaia is uneventful and solitary—all of the crewmen avoid her and leave once they drop her off. She is glad to be home, but when she transplants the rare herbs from Mount Dicte, she suddenly feels the significance of her exile: if the plants die, she will never see them again. She does her best to reassimilate to her isolated island life: she sings, practices spells, and learns how to weave. But her mind returns to Daedalus’s words: “A golden cage is still a cage.”
The men of the ship’s crew avoid and isolate Circe, likely because they distrust her and are afraid of her powers. When she reaches her island, her loneliness continues; even though she tries to find fulfillment in her work, she lacks meaningful connections with others. Her exile demonstrates how misogyny often results in powerful women experiencing alienation. Circe recalls Daedalus’s words regarding the golden cage and realizes that she, like him, is a prisoner of the gods. Even though she feels like she may have power as a witch on her own, this power is an illusion—the gods are still in control of her, as they will not let her leave the island.
Themes
Alone on her island, Circe’s thoughts return to her argument with Pasiphaë. In an imagined conversation, Circe declares that her first spell was inspired by love, but Pasiphaë declares that it was to spite Helios and the others who spurned her. Pasiphaë then tells her to consider Perse and how she manipulated those around her, only to have the gods forbid her from having children with Helios. Circe admits that her mother was clever, while Pasiphaë’s voice rebukes her for rejecting Perse, hating her while crouching at Helios’s feet and hoping for his attention.
In the imagined argument, Pasiphaë is arguing that Circe is just like the rest of the family: spiteful, vain, and cruel. Circe realizes that her intentions behind transforming Glaucos were not as pure and honorable as she had once made them out to be. Rather, she transformed him out of selfishness and spite. After all, she was willing to commit whatever evil was necessary to make Glaucos an immortal, which led to her making Scylla into a terrible monster. Pasiphaë implicitly accuses Circe of being sexist when, as a child, she spurned their mother in order to win their father’s favor. This was likely because Circe believed that Helios, as a man, was inherently more important than Perse, a woman who nonetheless managed to eke out some power for herself.
Themes
Circe recalls Pasiphaë’s surprise at Circe’s refusal to say that they are similar. She then wonders what life would have been like had she known Pasiphaë’s feelings, or if they grew up elsewhere; she wishes that they could have had an affectionate sisterly bond. Then she imagines Pasiphaë’s insults and shouts her rejection of her to the wind.
Circe faces the reality that she does share many similarities with her family members. For a moment, she wonders whether she and Pasiphaë could have been close if their situation was different, but she knows that it is useless to dwell on such wishes—she can’t change anything about the past. What matters is that Pasiphaë is malicious to her and always will be. Circe doesn’t want to have anything to do with Pasiphaë and her family’s cruelty, which she makes clear by verbally rejecting her in her imaginary conversation with her sister.
Themes
Hermes visits her again, but Circe finds that he is beginning to repulse her: some of his jokes disgust her, and she feels uncomfortable in his “perfect and unscarred” hands. He loves her fluctuating moods and keeps coming back with news and stories.
After her genuine connection with Daedalus, Circe is disappointed by Hermes. She specifically hates his “unscarred” hands, which represent to her how cold and unchanging he is. Daedalus’s hands were badly scarred, and they were a constant reminder of his personal growth and his craft, both of which Circe related to. Hermes has no such scars; he is a god, so his body shows no changes, which also represents how he himself does not grow as a character. While Circe returns to Aiaia feeling different—she is more aware of her loneliness and guiltier over Scylla, and she now knows the feeling of a true emotional connection—Hermes has stayed the same. He still doesn’t care for Circe, as he’s still focused on his own amusement.
Themes
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On one visit, Hermes tells Circe of the fall of the Minotaur. With Crete threatening rebellion after years of losing their youth to the monster, Minos ordered youths from Athens to be sacrificed in retaliation for his son’s death. Since the alternative was war, the king of Athens agreed. One of his sons, Theseus, was chosen to be sacrificed.
Just as Circe suspected, Minos uses the Minotaur as a tool to intimidate people and maintain power. At first, Minos kept his kingdom under his control by feeding its youth to the Minotaur, likely using the beast to menace his subjects into obedience. When they began threatening to overthrow him, Minos sacrificed youths from Athens, another city. This way, his kingdom felt relief from the Minotaur, and Minos exerted his dominance over Athens. Minos had been planning on going to war against Athens, but the Minotaur let him save the money and resources that a war requires, all while getting Athens to submit to him anyway.
Themes
Ariadne fell in love with Theseus. Before he entered the Labyrinth (the lair that Daedalus had made for the Minotaur), she gave him a sword and taught him how to navigate his way. When Theseus killed the Minotaur, however, Ariadne still cried for its death; Hermes explains that she had loved the creature, even though it nearly killed her once.
Despite her wicked family, Ariadne remained compassionate, as evidenced by her helping Theseus despite her father’s wishes. She was also sympathetic to the Minotaur, which emphasizes her benevolence—she was able to pity its fate, even though (or perhaps because) it was senselessly violent. Thus, Ariadne is as another example of someone who withstood the wickedness of her family and remained empathetic in spite of it.
Themes
Hermes proceeds with Ariadne’s tale, which ends with her dying at the hands of Artemis, although he never understood why. When he sees Circe’s grief at the girl’s death, he teases her that she’ll drown if she cries over every mortal’s death. She orders him to leave and then wonders at the irony of how all mortals, even the most vivacious and inventive, will all fade to dust, while “every petty and useless god” exists forever.
Never needing to worry about his own mortality, Hermes has no empathy for mortals and is unconcerned by their deaths. Ancient as he is, he has watched a countless number of mortals die, and so he has presumably lost interest in them and their lives—there’s no novelty in mortals dying. Circe, however, is distressed at Ariadne’s death, particularly because it was brought about so heartlessly. Hermes doesn’t even remember why Artemis killed Ariadne, which suggests that Artemis killed the girl for an insignificant and selfish reason. Artemis’s careless destruction of a human life makes Circe think about the injustice of mortals dying despite the fact that they are livelier and more creative than gods, who are petty but exist forever. Again, Circe associates mortality with creativity and fulfillment, whereas gods are described as “useless.”
Themes
Hermes continues to visit—Circe can’t deny the company. One day, she asks for stories of Pasiphaë. After giving her some milder details, Hermes tells Circe his most grotesque story about Pasiphaë. Shortly after they married, Minos raped various serving girls in front of Pasiphaë. To get back at him, Pasiphaë cast a spell that turned his semen into poisonous reptiles, so that each girl was stung to death from within. Circe is so sickened by the grisly tale that after ordering Hermes away, she locks herself in her house and declares that she will shut out the other gods and their vengeful, wicked world forever.
Hermes’s story is the final straw for Circe; after hearing it, Circe wants nothing more to do with the gods. The tale captures the gods’ cruelty and petty power struggles. Minos probably raped the serving girls to display his power, likely to show Pasiphaë that she had no authority in their marriage while he, the man, could disgrace her. Pasiphaë retaliated by using her magic and killed the serving girls in a grotesquely violent way, all to show off her power and humiliate her husband. She had no concern for the women—she saw them merely as tools to use to exert dominance over her new husband. By killing the serving girls, who were already the victims of rape, Pasiphaë demonstrates the cruelty and carelessness of those seeking power—specifically, the gods, who are notoriously careless with mortals’ lives. Meanwhile, Minos’s raping of the serving girls shows how women are vulnerable to abuse at the hands of men in ancient Greece. They have very little power and are often exploited by the men around them. The story sickens Circe—repulsed by her family, she wants to distance herself from their wickedness.
Themes
