Phrasal Etymology-“Between Scylla and Charybdis”
In Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, one of the many challenges faced by Odysseus on his voyage back to Ithaca after the Trojan War is how to safely navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, two terrifying monsters who lived on either side of a narrow straight. Scylla was a man-eating beast with six heads on long snake-like necks and Charybdis regularly swallowed and belched out huge amounts of seawater, creating a deadly and impassable whirlpool that swallowed ships. Sailors could not steer clear of one of the monsters without coming into the range of the other. In Homer’s tale (spoiler alert) the goddess Circe advises Odysseus on how to make it through the straight, albeit at the cost of six of his sailors’ lives.
It appears that the source of the legend is two actual navigational hazards on either side of the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian peninsula. Regardless, the idiom “between Scylla and Charybdis” long ago entered the lexicon, meaning caught between two equally unappealing alternatives, akin to “between a rock and a hard place.” Some of you may recall it in the lyrics of a pop song from the early 1980s, whose composer was a teacher before he became a rock star.
In common usage, we simply say ‘between the devil and the deep sea’.