The Feast That Was a Snare (Homer’s The Odyssey, Book 10 – Part 8)

A song becomes an invitation, and hospitality turns to horror. What seems like welcome shelter reveals a far crueler design.

In The Odyssey, Book 10, Circe answers the call of Odysseus’ men and invites them into her shining halls. She feeds them richly — cheese, honey, barley-meal, and wine — but laces the meal with drugs that erase all thought of home. With a stroke of her wand, she transforms them into swine, their bodies changed though their minds remain painfully human.

This passage marks one of the poem’s most chilling reversals, where trust leads directly to enchantment and loss, and the cost of heedlessness is made flesh.

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