Most people know Circe as the witch who turned Odysseus's men into pigs, which badly undersells her. She's the daughter of the sun god Helios, and in Homer she's dangerous for one episode and indispensable for the next. Once Odysseus resists her drugged cup, protected by an herb called moly that Hermes gives him, she becomes his lover for a year. Then she gives him the sailing directions that get him past the Sirens and between Scylla and Charybdis. The enchantress who nearly ends the voyage is the one who makes it possible to finish.
Waterhouse's Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891), now at Gallery Oldham in England, takes the moment before any of that is decided. The cleverest thing in it is where he put Ulysses: only in the round mirror behind her throne, small and wary. That places the viewer exactly where the hero stands. The cup isn't being offered to someone in the painting. It's being offered to you. Victorian gallery-goers were invited to feel both the temptation and the nerve it takes to refuse, and the painting works less as a story than as a test.
The oldest interpretation of her spell is still the sharpest. Ancient and Renaissance allegorists read Circe as pleasure itself and the moly as reason: she doesn't turn men into something alien, she turns them into what their appetites had already made them. Plutarch pushed the joke further in a short dialogue in which Odysseus asks Circe to restore one of the pigs, a man named Gryllus, to human form. Gryllus refuses. Animals, he argues, are braver, more temperate and more honest than people, and he'd rather stay a pig. It's one of the funniest pieces of ancient philosophy, and it complicates the easy moral. Who exactly is being degraded here?
Waterhouse painted his enchantresses during fierce public debate about the "New Woman" of the late nineteenth century, educated, independent and in no hurry to marry, and he's often lumped in with the era's femme fatale fantasies. His Circe is more interesting than that: composed, curious, fully in command, waiting to see what you'll do. Other writers have kept finding more in her. Augusta Webster gave her a voice of her own in an 1870 monologue, bored and restless on her island. James Joyce turned her episode into the hallucinatory brothel chapter of Ulysses, and Madeline Miller's 2018 novel Circe made her a heroine for a new generation.
What keeps the painting alive is the question it hands the viewer. Every life has its offered cup: comfort, flattery, the easy pleasure that asks only a small surrender of who you meant to be. Circe doesn't force anyone to drink. She simply holds it out, and waits, and lets you discover what you'd turn into.
Waterhouse's Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses appears on our: