Gryllus, by Plutarch: the pig who refused to return

In the Odyssey, Circe turns Ulysses' men into pigs, and the most disturbing detail is not the animal body: it is that the mind stays fully intact inside it. Eight hundred years later, a Greek philosopher picked up that scene and asked the question that still stings: what if one of them did not want to go back?

Circe, the pigs, and the mind that does not change

On Circe's island, in Book X of the Odyssey, the sorceress welcomes Ulysses' men with a feast, food and wine, and turns all of them into pigs, except Eurylochus, who stayed outside out of suspicion and is the one who runs back to tell what he saw. The poem describes the transformation with a precision that is the real horror of the scene:

"They had the head, the voice, the bristles and the body of pigs, but their mind remained as steady as before." (Odyssey, Book X; verse checked against the Portuguese edition of Christian Werner, Cosac Naify, 2014)

It is not a loss of identity. It is imprisonment inside it. They know exactly what happened, and they cannot say a word. Ulysses escapes with the help of the god Hermes and an herb called moly, and forces Circe to undo the spell. Told this way, the episode closes like a rescue story. Except that, for at least one ancient reader, it did not close at all.

Eight hundred years later, a pig speaks up

Plutarch, a Greek biographer and philosopher who also served as a priest at Delphi, wrote in the Moralia, the same collection of practical treatises that gave us How to Listen, a short dialogue that became known by the name of its main character: Gryllus (the text belongs to the treatise today called Bruta animalia ratione uti, Moralia 985D-992E). In it, Ulysses returns to Circe's island and asks her to give the Greeks who still live in animal skin their human shape back. Circe agrees, on one condition: that he ask them first.

And one of the pigs, named Gryllus, speaks up. And says he does not want to.

The argument of the pig who refuses to return

Gryllus' argument is not a tantrum, it is a comparison, and that is why the text has survived twenty centuries. He says that courage and temperance, which in a human being cost a lifetime of training and still fail at the decisive moment, come ready-made by nature in an animal. The beast does not need a general's speech before battle to act with courage, and does not need willpower to eat what is enough and stop there. Where the human being struggles, and often loses, the animal simply is.

In other words: Gryllus is telling Ulysses that being a man is a bad deal.

Why this objection is still alive

Notice what is at stake. Ulysses spends the whole Odyssey being taken apart, losing ships, name, companions and standing, and fighting to put himself back together, piece by piece. Gryllus was taken apart the same way, lost his human shape, and the difference is that he liked the result. As a pig, he does not need to remember who he was, does not need to prove anything to anyone, does not need to be recognized by anyone else. The entire demand of becoming human again, with everything it costs, has simply stopped existing for him.

Ulysses wants to return. Gryllus does not. That is the only difference between the two, and it is the engine of two works separated by eight hundred years: one that celebrates the return as a hero's greatest feat, another that asks, with all the seriousness the genre allows, whether it was worth it at all.

It is this tension, between someone who crosses the world to become someone again and someone who would rather not, that the Nous class on the Odyssey follows through the encounter between Ulysses, Circe, and Gryllus himself. It is worth watching to see how Homer and Plutarch, read together, argue with each other about what starting over actually means.

Continue: The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis · Nobody is my name: Odysseus and the Cyclops · Metis: Odysseus' intelligence is not cunning · Vatican and Caravaggio Museums
Source class (YouTube): Odisseia, de Homero