Odyssey 10.325 · Book 10, lines 325–330
Then you must be Odysseus
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Circe — τίς πόθεν εἰς ἀνδρῶν; πόθι τοι πόλις ἠδὲ τοκῆες; θαῦμά μʼ ἔχει ὡς οὐ τι πιὼν τάδε φάρμακʼ ἐθέλχθης· οὐδὲ γὰρ οὐδέ τις ἄλλος ἀνὴρ τάδε φάρμακʼ ἀνέτλη, ὅς κε πίῃ καὶ πρῶτον ἀμείψεται ἕρκος ὀδόντων. σοὶ δέ τις ἐν στήθεσσιν ἀκήλητος νόος ἐστίν. ἦ σύ γʼ Ὀδυσσεύς ἐσσι πολύτροπος, ὅν τέ μοι αἰεὶ
Who are you, and from where among men? Where is your city and your parents? Amazement holds me that you drank these drugs and were not bewitched. For no other man ever has withstood these drugs, once he has drunk them and they pass the barrier of his teeth. But in you there is a mind proof against spells within your breast. Surely you are Odysseus, the man of many turns, whom always to me—
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The setting
Circe, at his knees, questions the man her drug could not touch. Her wonder resolves into recognition: only one mortal was ever fated to resist her — the one Hermes long foretold would come.
A note on this passage
Circe opens with the standard Homeric challenge to a stranger — who are you, from where, what city, what parents — but she asks it from her knees, and the questions are really one question: how did you survive my cup? She answers it herself. No other man has ever drunk her drugs and kept his shape; this one has a νόος ἀκήλητος, a mind that cannot be charmed.
The undercurrent is recognition by resistance. Circe knows Odysseus not by his face or his name but by the single fact that her magic failed — and that failure matches an old prophecy: Hermes had always told her the man of many turns would come. He does not announce himself; his defining trait, the mind no drug can hold, announces him for him. The epithet πολύτροπος, ‘of many turns,’ is doing the same work as at the poem's start: the man is known by his unmasterable mind.
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