Sarah Reavis April 14th, 2014 Lucy Steele English 1102 Rough Draft for Inquiry Academic Paper

A ship full of sailors are travelling along what is now called the Strait of Messina, and suddenly, the sky goes dark. The sea starts to roil under the boat, and the birds all flee to the North. The sailors all peer over the side of the boat as it starts creaking, and see the water shifting toward the middle of the strait. They see giant, shark-fin like teeth rising out of the water. Frightened, they try and turn the boat around, but it is too late. The rudders are stuck in the creatures teeth. Snapping wood and falling sails warn the sailors of their imminent deaths, and they fall to their knees and pray to the Gods to spare them. With a giant splash, the boat goes under, never to be seen again. This story is about the mythological creature Charybdis, a famed whirlpool in the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Italy. It was used to warn the sailors in the Roman Navy against poor sailing. The Romans were always using cautionary tales to push everyone to be the best humans they could be. The monsters were often portrayed as women, harsh and violent, or as Mythical beings that looked like men. The men however, were not as evil looking as the women. Why were women portrayed as evil, monstrous things, when the men were seen as godly, and non-vengeful? Most of the Roman mythological monsters were seen as women, and most of those monsters were horrendous, giant beasts transformed into that state by a Goddess jealous of the attention the human was getting, or wanting revenge for being dissed by the human in a place of their

worship. A prime example of this is Medusa. She was originally a ravishingly beautiful maiden, who was the jealous aspiration of many suitors. She was not transformed because of this however. Athena, goddess of wisdom and warfare, stole her beauty because Medusa slept with the God Poseidon in a palace of worship to Athena. The enraged Athena transformed her beautiful hair to serpents, and made her face so terrible to look at that it would turn a man to stone at the mere sight of it. Perseus himself describes the punishment as well earned in Ovids Telling of the story. In the case of Charybdis, she was the daughter of Poseidon. She aided him into his feud against Zeus by engulfing his islands in water. Zeus, angry for the land she stole from him, cursed her into a hideous bladder of a monster, with flippers for arms and legs, and an uncontrollable thirst for the sea. She drank from the sea three times a day to quench it, creating terrible whirlpools. She lingered on a rock with Scylla, facing her directly from the other side of the ocean to create a strait. Her theoretical size remains unknown, but in order for her to be able to consume a whole Greek or Roman ship, she would need to be about 75 feet across. All of the Goddesses were jealous of their God husbands and their various lovers. Most of the lovers were punished in some severe way, creating the monsters in the myths mentioned. Most of the monsters were placed there for a warning against future mishaps. They were used to make the Roman people the best they could possibly be. For example, Cerberus. He was the guard dog of the underworld, a three headed dog with a serpent tail, and on his back were innumerable snakes heads. He terrorizes souls upon their entrance to the Underworld. Another warner is Echidna. She was a mixture of a serpent and a woman, a beautiful nymph from the waist up but with the lower half of a snake. She would lure weary travelers in with her beautiful face during the day, offering them comfort and a place to sleep. But at night, while the travelers slept, her serpentine nature would take over and she would eat the travelers on the spot. She was also the mother of several other monsters, such as the Chimaera, the Hydra of Lernae, the Dragons of Colchis, and the garden of the Hesperides. The Lernaean Hydra was a snake with numerous heads that were sometimes said to be human like. It

was brought up near the river Amymone in order to provide a test for Heracles. The breath of the Hydra was so venomous that anyone who approached it would die, even if the monster was sleeping. Heracles tried to destroy it, but as soona s one head would be cut off, three more would grow in its place. The only way to kill it was to sear the wound as soon as it was chopped. Monsters were common in the stories the Romans told as well. Some were very similar to the myths, but are still recounted to this day. The Iliad and the Odyssey are the two most known stories that live on to this day. In one of the tales, the Cyclopes were giant humanoids with one eye and a taste for sheep. It was also thrown into the underworld by their brother Cronus. But Zeus released them and in return, they gave him the gifts of thunder and lightning. Jason and his Argonauts faced a giant one in the quest for the Golden Fleece, and killed it in pursuit of the treasure.