Before she was a six-headed terror snatching sailors off the deck, Scylla was a water nymph bathing in a quiet spring near the Strait of Messina. This episode reconstructs her biography from the contradictory ancient genealogies, some naming Hecate or Typhon and Echidna as parents, through Ovid's account of the fisherman-turned-sea-god Glaucus, the sorceress Circe's jealous poisoning of her bathing pool, and the body horror of dog heads erupting from her own flesh.

We then examine her encounter with Odysseus, who must silently sacrifice six men to her rather than lose his whole ship to Charybdis, and her death at the hands of Heracles and resurrection by fire. Ancient rationalizers get their turn, too, recasting her as a Tyrrhenian pirate ship, a courtesan with a gang of wild dogs, a dogfish, or a jagged reef, before Renaissance and Romanti ...