Everyone knows the witch who turned sailors into pigs, but Circe's story has been rewritten for millennia. This deep dive traces her biography from her birth to Helios and the oceanid Perse, with siblings Aeetes and Pasiphae, through the early myths where rejection by Glaucus and Picus leads her to transform the innocent nymph Scylla into a monster and a king into a woodpecker. It reads her earthly, botanical magic as a source of unique terror for ancient Greeks used to gods hurling thunderbolts from afar, and as a projection of patriarchal anxiety about autonomous women.

The episode then examines the famous encounter with Odysseus, the herb moly from Hermes, and the pivot from threat to mentor as Circe supplies the map through the underworld. It follows the strange aftermath in the lost epic Telegony, where her son Telegonus kills Odysseus ...