The Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the Sun

Odysseus returns from the dead to Circe's island. She gives him the rest of his sailing instructions and lets him go. First the Sirens, whose song lures sailors to their deaths. Odysseus stops his men's ears with wax but, on Circe's advice, has himself tied to the mast so that he alone can hear the song. He hears it, begs to be set free, and is bound tighter. The ship sails past. Then the choice of monsters: Scylla, a six-headed creature who takes one man for each head when a ship sails past, and Charybdis, a vast whirlpool that swallows whole ships.

Odysseus chooses Scylla — losing six men is better than losing them all. The six men die screaming his name as they are lifted into the air. He says, twenty years later in the palace of the Phaeacians, that this was the most painful thing he ever saw. Then the island of Helios, the sun. Odysseus has been warned by both Tiresias and Circe: do not eat the sacred cattle of the sun, no matter how hungry you are. They land for fresh water; a storm strands them for a month. The food runs out. Odysseus's men, while he is asleep, kill and eat the cattle.

Helios demands satisfaction. Zeus grants it. When they finally sail, he sends a thunderbolt that shatters the ship and drowns every man but Odysseus, who clings to a piece of wreckage and is carried back to the strait of Charybdis. He survives by clinging to a fig tree above the whirlpool until his timber floats up again. Nine days later he washes up on Calypso's island — where the poem's present finds him, seven years on. The flashback ends here. The hero's own voice falls silent, and the next chapter resumes in the third person, in the harbor of the Phaeacians.