Is Circe by Madeline Miller a retelling?

Between its beautiful bronze covers, “Circe” contains Madeline Miller’s ode to powerful and resilient women. 

“Circe” is Madeline Miller’s second novel and the spiritual sequel to her highly acclaimed retelling of “The Illiad,” through “The Song of Achilles.” The novel reinvents “The Odyssey” through the eyes of a sorceress, Circe, who garners little attention in the story’s original adaption. Choosing Circe as both her narrator and main character, Miller allows for the story of Odysseus’ journeys to play on in the background, woefully avoiding telling the same story dozens before her have tried to reinvent. 

In the classic epics of Homer, Circe is a power-hungry and greedy sorceress confined to her lonely island, known for turning men to pigs in her free time for the simple pleasure of watching them suffer. In Miller’s adaption, Circe is simply a woman trying to find her place in a world that does not seem to want her. Torn between the world of gods and the world of mortals, Circe’s exists with unparalleled loneliness and longing before she is exiled to become the all-powerful sorceress known in Homer’s epics.

It may be Miller’s extended knowledge in classics that allows her to completely take the reins on the story of Circe. She’s created an entirely new myth on the mere bones that Homer’s epics had given her. Though the story is new, her myth is just as enchanting and captivating as the ones that Homer sang centuries before. Miller writes Circe with such a fierceness that is it hard not to fall in love with the character and blow through the book in a matter of hours. 

Whereas the tale of Circe lacks the action and dramatic plot found in “The Song of Achilles,” Miller’s character and world-building make up for it. No one in their right mind should be able to relate to the story of a young goddess whose life resembles virtually nothing of their own, in a world that is wholly fictional, but Miller pulls it off. The way in which Miller weaves Circe’s hopes and desires feels so effortlessly human that you find yourself forgetting that she is a work of centuries-old fiction. 

While Miller focuses her myth on a female character, she does not shy away from revealing how women were viewed and treated in classical mythology, at one point even having Circe muse that “humbling women seem(ed) to be a chief pastime of poets.” Miller’s examples of sexism are not glaring or always completely obvious — they thread through the background and lurk just around the corner. The injustices of Circe’s life do not eclipse her narrative, and they are rarely addressed outside of Circe’s own musings, if at all. Miller’s subtle but ever-present nod to the misrepresentation of women in Greek mythology gives the book an edge of self-awareness that it would otherwise lack.  

“Circe” is a smash hit of a book, and Miller’s lyrical prose remains just as breathtaking and effortless as it was in “The Song of Achilles.” My only hope is that Miller will live long enough to rewrite every old epic sung by men who were too dismissive of women to ever rightfully immortalize them.

Madeline Miller’s 2011 retelling of the Iliad, The Song of Achilles, recast the epic as a love story between Achilles and Patroclus, taking us into the emotional heart of some of the most moving and memorable passages in the poem. The book was a surprise hit, winning Miller – then a Latin and Greek teacher – the Orange prizecorrect and a place on the bestseller lists. What she was doing was nothing new – writers have been reimagining Homer’s work since the Aeneid – but the contemporary tone and modern sensibility did something extraordinary to the well-known tale. The best historical fiction balances the past and present in the text, so that it both celebrates and collapses the distance between then and now. In The Song of Achilles, Miller rendered that ancient war thrillingly, grippingly present; her vision of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was one of steaming, timeless sensuality.

Miller begins Circe in the court of Helios: the sun god and her heroine’s father. “His palace was a neighbour to Oceanos’, buried in the earth’s rock, and its walls were made of obsidian.” From the start, we are made aware of Circe’s inferior status – “Circe is dull as a rock,” says her father. She is named after her yellow eyes – circe means hawk – and for the “thin sound” of her crying, which we later learn is because she has been born with the voice of a mortal, not a god. Circe witnesses the punishment of Prometheus and this kindles a deep sympathetic interest in humans. Soon after, she meets Glaucos, a fisherman, and they become lovers. Wishing to keep him from his own mortality, she makes the first use of pharmaka – the magical herbs that activate her sorcery. Glaucos becomes a god, “towering like a sea-surge”, green-haired and trident-wielding. He swiftly grows tired of the unprepossessing Circe and transfers his attentions to Scylla, a beautiful sea-nymph. Circe, enraged, turns her witchcraft upon the nymph, and is exiled to a beautiful, unpeopled island.

It is here, on Aiaia, that Odysseus finds her, happily surrounded by tame wolves and lions and swine – the latter are earlier visitors that she has bewitched after an unwise sea captain attempts to rape her. As with her previous novel, the great skill here is the way Miller gives voice to a previously muted perspective in the classics, forging a great romance from the scraps left to us by the ancients. If The Song of Achilles recovered a half-buried homosexual love story from the Iliad, Circe gives us a feminist slant on the Odyssey. “Humbling women seems to be a chief pastime of poets,” Circe says at one point. “As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.” It’s fitting that Circe is published just a year after the first major female translation of the Odyssey, by Emily Wilson. Wilson said in her introduction to that translation “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about”.

In Miller’s vision Circe, who is passed over in a few dozen lines in the Greek original, matters deeply. Hilary Mantel has spoken repeatedly of the problems that arise when modern ethical mores are placed in the mouths of historical figures. In her Reith Lectures, she says: “This is a persistent difficulty for women writers, who want to write about women in the past, but can’t resist retrospectively empowering them.” Miller flouts Mantel’s interdiction winningly, joyously, and in a way that is powerfully affecting.

The Song of Achilles may have been a bestseller, but its critical reception was decidedly mixed. Fusty – and almost always male – critics lamented the historical inaccuracies, the liberties taken with the text, the cliches. They missed the point that Miller was seeking to popularise stories that were first popular three millennia ago, employing the tools of the novelist to reveal new internal landscapes in these familiar tales. In her Circe, Miller has made a collage out of a variety of source materials – from Ovid to Homer to another lost epic, the Telegony – but the guiding instinct here is to re-present the classics from the perspective of the women involved in them, and to do so in a way that makes these age-old texts thrum with contemporary relevance. If you read this book expecting a masterpiece to rival the originals, you’ll be disappointed; Circe is, instead, a romp, an airy delight, a novel to be gobbled greedily in a single sitting.

Is Circe a retelling?

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