The Odyssey Retold: Circe, Monsters and Myth

The episode opens with a reading from Madeline Miller's Circe — the moment Odysseus arrives on her island and the two trade dry observations about war. "Vengeance, lust, hubris, greed, power," Odysseus lists when Circe asks what the Trojan War was about. "What have I forgotten? Ah yes, vanity and peacocks." It is a scene that captures the book's central achievement: taking a sidelined figure from Homer's Odyssey — the witch who turns men into pigs — and giving her a voice, a psychology, and a story that reorients the entire myth.

The Framework: A Sidelined Character Becomes the Protagonist

Circe belongs to a popular genre of the last decade: retelling ancient stories from the perspective of female characters who were previously marginal or villainized. Pat Barker and Natalie Haynes have done similar work, but Miller's version stands apart for how it handles narrative voice. The challenge is to write in a register that feels neither modern nor archaically Victorian — to make Circe's world accessible while preserving its strangeness. Miller, who taught Greek and Latin, spent seven years on the book, discarding 300 pages of an early draft and keeping only two sentences. The result is prose that one host describes as "effortless and yet beautifully embroidered."