Scylla. In Greek mythology, Scylla was a legendary monster that lived on one side of a narrow channel of water, opposite her counterpart Charybdis.
The two sides of the strait were within an arrow's range of each other, so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis would pass dangerously close to Scylla and vice versa. Scylla made her first appearance in Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus and his crew encounter her and Charybdis on their travels.
Later myth gave her an origin story as a beautiful nymph who gets turned into a monster. The strait where Scylla dwelled has been associated with the Strait of Messina between Calabria, a region of Southern Italy, and Sicily, for example, as in Book Three of Virgil's Aeneid.
The coastal town of Scilla in Calabria takes its name from the mythological figure of Scylla and it is said to be the home of the nymph. The idiom between Scylla and Charybdis has come to mean being forced to choose between two similarly dangerous situations.
The parentage of Scylla varies according to author. Homer, Ovid, Apollodorus, Servius, and a scholiast on Plato, all name Crataeis as the mother of Scylla. Neither Homer nor Ovid mentions a father, but Apollodorus says that the father was either Trienus or Phorcus, similarly the Plato scholiast, perhaps following Apollodorus, gives the father as Tyrrhenus or Phorcus, while Eustathius on Homer, Odyssey 12.85, gives
The two sides of the strait were within an arrow's range of each other, so close that sailors attempting to avoid Charybdis would pass dangerously close to Scylla and vice versa. Scylla made her first appearance in Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus and his crew encounter her and Charybdis on their travels.
Later myth gave her an origin story as a beautiful nymph who gets turned into a monster. The strait where Scylla dwelled has been associated with the Strait of Messina between Calabria, a region of Southern Italy, and Sicily, for example, as in Book Three of Virgil's Aeneid.
The coastal town of Scilla in Calabria takes its name from the mythological figure of Scylla and it is said to be the home of the nymph. The idiom between Scylla and Charybdis has come to mean being forced to choose between two similarly dangerous situations.
The parentage of Scylla varies according to author. Homer, Ovid, Apollodorus, Servius, and a scholiast on Plato, all name Crataeis as the mother of Scylla. Neither Homer nor Ovid mentions a father, but Apollodorus says that the father was either Trienus or Phorcus, similarly the Plato scholiast, perhaps following Apollodorus, gives the father as Tyrrhenus or Phorcus, while Eustathius on Homer, Odyssey 12.85, gives
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