Telemachus loves stories of heroism and virtue, and he is childishly sure that Odysseus, his father, is a hero. Circe wants to keep him with her on Aiaia forever, but she also wants him to have a happy life, one where he can feel free as she never felt when living with Helios. But Telegonus grows up restless and always wanting to leave the island. Circe is ignorant of this prophecy and does everything in her power to keep her son alive, including creating a protective barrier around the island. ” Her fear of the gods’ involvement is almost immediately realized when Athena starts trying to kill Telegonus, because she knows that he will grow up to kill Odysseus. When Telegonus is born, Circe loves him deeply, and also knows that, because of her boundless love for him, he is “the thing the gods could use against. It is also implied that Circe decides to have a child to alleviate her loneliness while in exile and to give her a purpose beyond mere survival. Although she never explicitly states why she decides to have a child, she seems to be inspired by both Daedalus’s and Odysseus’s affection for their sons (although, when Odysseus actually meets his son Telemachus as an adult, the love evaporates quickly when he sees that his son is not like him). Telegonus’s name means “far away,” which represents how Circe has him far away from everyone else and tries to keep him for herself alone. This is what it means to be alive.Telegonus is Circe’s and Odysseus’s son, although Odysseus never learns of his existence. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet.

I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers.

I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. They are words you might speak to a child. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years. He sits with me in the greensmelling darkness, holding my hand. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. I create something, I transform something. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. “I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath.

Circe novel