Circe’s Instructions to Odysseus (OD. 10.507–40) As an Early Sibylline Oracle

Abstract

Scholars have noted that Circe’s instructions to Odysseus illustrate a speech type-scene comprised of directions and then instructions – or ‘map’ and ‘script’: first she tells him (i) how to get to the entrance to Hades and then (ii) what rituals to do and what words to say after he gets there (Od. 10.507–40). This essay argues that the Odyssey poet is, in fact, using the vocabulary and syntax of an important subset of this speech-act: hexametrical oracles, as we see them quoted a few centuries later by Herodotus and parodied by Aristophanes. Her advice, moreover, also echoes closely a specific kind of Archaic oracle that directed Greek colonists to a far-away place and that was typical of the female prophets called ‘Sibyls’, who lived near the Aegean coastline in places where the Homeric poems were originally composed and performed.