Daughter of the sun god Helios, sister to Aeetes (father of the sorceress Medea) and Pasiphae (mother of the Minotaur), Circe comes from a lineage soaked in magical power. On her island of Aeaea, that power turns Odysseus's entire crew into pigs — everyone except the one man protected before he even sets foot on shore.
When Odysseus's scouting party arrives on Aeaea, Circe welcomes them with a feast laced with a transformative drug, then strikes them with her wand — turning the entire party into pigs, retaining their human minds while trapped in animal bodies. Warned in advance by the god Hermes, Odysseus alone approaches protected — armed with moly, a magical herb with a black root and white flower, described as "dangerous for a mortal man to pluck, but not for the gods."
Immune to her drug and unaffected by her wand, Odysseus draws his sword on Circe — and rather than fighting further, she recognises him as the one prophesied to resist her magic, restores his transformed crew, and invites him to her bed. Following Hermes's earlier advice, Odysseus first makes her swear an oath not to harm him. What follows is not a brief stop but a full year of feasting and comfort on Aeaea — until his own crew, growing restless, finally reminds their captain that Ithaca still waits.
Circe does not simply release Odysseus emptyhanded. She advises him on the perilous stretch of the journey still ahead — including the necessary descent to the underworld to consult the prophet Tiresias, and detailed warnings about the Sirens and the strait between Scylla and Charybdis, both covered elsewhere in this collection.
A tragic postscript beyond Homer: later tradition — recorded in the now-lost epic the Telegony — gives Circe and Odysseus a son, Telegonus. Years later, searching for his father, Telegonus unknowingly kills Odysseus in a skirmish, fulfilling a story arc Homer's own Odyssey never includes but which the wider mythic tradition treats as canonical.
Madeline Miller's Circe (2018): the bestselling novel that fully reimagines Circe as a complex protagonist in her own right — exploring her exile to Aeaea, the slow discovery of her own power, and her uneasy relationship to mortality — became a genuine cultural phenomenon and a defining example of the broader wave of feminist Greek myth retellings that has also produced treatments of Atalanta, Medusa and Penelope.