Odyssey 10.241 · Book 10, lines 241–243
The swine, penned with the minds of men
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ὣς οἱ μὲν κλαίοντες ἐέρχατο, τοῖσι δὲ Κίρκη πάρ ῥʼ ἄκυλον βάλανόν τε βάλεν καρπόν τε κρανείης ἔδμεναι, οἷα σύες χαμαιευνάδες αἰὲν ἔδουσιν.
So they, weeping, were penned in; and Circe cast before them acorns and oak-nuts and cornel fruit to eat, such things as swine that bed on the ground always eat.
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The setting
Odysseus, telling his tale to the Phaeacians, reaches Circe's island. Her wand and drugged cup have made his scouts into swine while leaving their minds human. Circe pens them and throws down pig-fodder.
A note on this passage
The transformation is complete and the detail is domestic: Circe shuts the men-swine in and tosses down acorns and cornel-berries, the exact mast real pigs root for. The horror is in the ordinariness — they are fed like livestock.
The thing the lines do not say aloud is the one the poem has just told us: their minds are unchanged. They weep. So the creatures bedding in the dirt and eating oak-mast know they are men, and know what they have become. A comic figure, the man turned pig, becomes quietly a picture of a mind trapped in the wrong body.
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