By most accounts, she was the daughter of the sun god Helios and Perse, one of the three thousand Oceanid nymphs. In
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Strabo writes that a tomb-shrine of Circe was attended in one of the Pharmacussae islands, off the coast of Attica, typical for hero-worship. Circe was also venerated in Mount Circeo, in the Italian peninsula, which took … See more

Giovanni Boccaccio provided a digest of what was known of Circe during the Middle Ages in his De mulieribus claris (Famous Women, 1361–1362). While following the tradition that she lived in Italy, he comments … See more

Scenes from the Odyssey are common on Greek pottery, the Circe episode among them. The two most common representations have Circe surrounded by the transformed sailors and Odysseus threatenin… See more

Beside the verse dramas, with their lyrical interludes, on which many operas were based, there were poetic texts which were set as secular cantatas. One of the earliest was Alessandro Stradella's La Circe, in a setting for t… See more

In later Christian opinion, Circe was an abominable witch using miraculous powers to evil ends. When the existence of witches came to be questioned, she was reinterpreted as a depressive suffering from delusions… See more