Circe’s Instructions as a Sibylline Oracle

Abstract

This chapter argues that the instructional oracle was a short hexametrical genre known to the Homeric poet and that he used it to frame the detailed instructions that Circe and Tiresias give Odysseus in the Iliad. It offers a close reading of the two parts of Circe’s advice to Odysseus and compares Circe’s advice with that offered to the initiate in the “Orphic” gold tablets and to Odysseus by Nausicaa in Odyssey 6. It examines, as well, the prophetic speeches of Tiresias in Odyssey 11 and of Eidotheia and Proteus in Odyssey 3, in order to show how the doubling of the prophetic scenes in both places seems to diminish the authority of the local female speaker, in order to get the more panoramic and indeed Panhellenic viewpoints of Proteus and Tiresias. It closes by discussing the instructional oracles of the Erythraean Sibyl and suggests that she and the hexametrical oracles attributed to her were local models for Circe and her instructions to Odysseus.