![]() In Homer, Circe is identified with her "lovely braids." The usual scholarly gloss on this is that the braids signal not only beauty, but also exoticism, because Eastern goddesses wore their hair in braids. Though most of Circe's fame derives from her short encounter with Odysseus in Book 10 of the Odyssey, Miller's novel covers a longer and more complex life.īut my favorite of Miller's small recalibrations is less lofty: It has to do with Circe's hairdo. For instance, Homer cryptically describes Circe as having a "human voice," leading centuries of readers to wonder: What is a divine voice? Do the gods have a language? Miller makes Circe's human voice the beginning of a (fraught, because inherently temporary) kinship with mortals that is one of the novel's loveliest strains. The character of Circe only occupies a few dozen lines of it, but Miller extracts worlds of meaning from Homer's short phrases. I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt."Ī classics teacher, Miller is clearly on intimate terms with the Greek poem. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. "Then I learned I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. "For a hundred generations, I have walked the world, drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease," she thinks. ![]() ![]() Though most of Circe's fame derives from her short encounter with Odysseus in Book 10 of the Odyssey, Miller's novel covers a longer and more complex life: her lonely childhood among the gods, her first encounter with mortals, who "looked weak as mushroom gills" next to the "vivid and glowing" divinities, the awakening of her powers, and finally, the men who wash up on her shores, souring her trust with their cruelty.īook Reviews In 'ODY-C,' A Greek Hero Worthy Of WomenĬirce is a nymph, daughter of the sun god Helios, banished to the island of Aiaia for using magic to turn a romantic rival into the monster Scylla. Miller's lush, gold-lit novel - told from the perspective of the witch whose name in Greek has echoes of a hawk and a weaver's shuttle - paints another picture: of a fierce goddess who, yes, turns men into pigs, but only because they deserve it. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep." Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime for poets. "I was not surprised by the portrait of myself," Circe says, "the proud witch undone before the hero's sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. But Odysseus, with the help of the god Hermes, tricks Circe and makes her beg for mercy before becoming her lover. Circe entraps his remaining men and turns them into pigs. Circe is referring to Homer's version of the story, in which Odysseus arrives on her island sea-battered and mourning for his men killed by the cruel Laestrygonians. "Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting," says the hero of Madeleine Miller's Circe, of her romance with the mortal Odysseus. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. The authors of the new paper make use of data from two of those spacecraft, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey orbiter, to locate water ice that could potentially be within reach of astronauts on the Red Planet.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Circe Author Madeline Miller To find ice that astronauts could easily dig up, the study's authors relied on two heat-sensitive instruments: MRO's Mars Climate Sounder and the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera on Mars Odyssey. (Study suggests Mars hosted life-sustaining habitat for millions of years, Wikinews) (A Fresh Look at Older Data Yields a Surprise Near the Martian Equator, NASA)įirst, they examined data from the gamma ray spectrometer aboard NASA's Odyssey spacecraft, from which they inferred how much of various radioactive elements would have been present in Mars's crust during the Noachian, and therefore how much radiation would have been available to split water and so produce hydrogen. ![]() ![]() Jack Wilson, a post-doctoral researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, led a team that reprocessed data collected from 2002 to 2009 by the neutron spectrometer instrument on NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft. (NASA's Treasure Map for Water Ice on Mars, NASA) (NASA InSight Lander Arrives on Martian Surface, NASA)ĭata from Odyssey's Gamma Ray Spectrometer, which is tailor-made for mapping water ice deposits, were also useful. #Odyssey meaning verification#Verification will come from NASA's Odyssey spacecraft, currently orbiting Mars. ![]()
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