Odyssey 10.391 · Book 10, lines 391–394
The bristles run from their limbs
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οἱ μὲν ἔπειτʼ ἔστησαν ἐναντίοι, ἡ δὲ διʼ αὐτῶν ἐρχομένη προσάλειφεν ἑκάστῳ φάρμακον ἄλλο. τῶν δʼ ἐκ μὲν μελέων τρίχες ἔρρεον, ἃς πρὶν ἔφυσε φάρμακον οὐλόμενον, τό σφιν πόρε πότνια Κίρκη·
They then stood facing her, and she, moving through them, anointed each with a different drug. And from their limbs the hairs fell away, which the accursed drug had grown before — the drug which queenly Circe had given them.
Word by word
The setting
Odysseus is telling the Phaeacians his tale. Circe has agreed to change his crew back from the swine she made of them. She goes down the line of penned men and rubs a fresh salve on each; the change reverses before his eyes.
A note on this passage
The undoing is as physical as the doing. Circe walks the row of swine and smears on a counter-salve, and the boar-bristles simply run off their limbs. The magic that made them animals is unmade by the same means that made it.
One word carries the point: φάρμακον, named twice in four lines, for the curse and for its cure. Greek keeps no separate word for poison and remedy — a φάρμακον is raw power over the body, and only the hand that wields it decides which way it cuts. Circe's ruinous drug and her restoring one are the same kind of thing turned around.
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