Scylla and Charybdis were both mythological sea monsters. They appear in Book XII of Homer's The Odyssey. They were counterparts, living on two different sides of a strait. They represented obstacles to Odysseus and his men. The phrase "between Scylla and Charybdis" has come to mean being stuck with two equally bad choices. This is similar to the phrase "stuck between a rock and a hard place."
Scylla lived on one side of the strait. In The Odyssey, the monster is described as having six heads, making it easy to snatch six sailors from Odysseus's ship if he happens to travel Scylla's way.
She has twelve misshapen feet, and six necks of the most prodigious length; and at the end of each neck she has a frightful head with three rows of teeth in each, all set very close together, so that they would crunch anyone to death in a moment, and she sits deep within her shady cell thrusting out her heads and peering all round the rock, fishing for dolphins or dogfish or any larger monster that she can catch, of the thousands with which Amphitrite teems.
Charybdis was a sea monster who would swallow huge amounts of water, thus creating a whirlpool. In some other stories and variations, Charybdis simply is a whirlpool and not the effect of some monster. Charybdis is also associated with the natural whirlpool that occurs in the Strait of Messina. This is located in southern Italy and it connects the Tyrrhenian Sea with the Ionian Sea.
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