Eurylochus (Εὐρύλοχος)

The Cautious One on Circe's Island

Eurylochus first comes into his own in Book 10, on the island of Aeaea. Odysseus divides the crew into two companies and lots are drawn for the scouting of Circe's palace; the lot falls to Eurylochus, and he sets off with twenty-two men. Outside the palace he sees wolves and lions, tamed by Circe's drugs, fawning like pets — and he alone grows suspicious and stays by the door. When his companions drink the potion and are driven into the sties as pigs, Eurylochus escapes back to the ship.

His caution saves him, and preserves the channel by which the news comes back. But Homer lets the "clear-sighted one" be the first to break: he returns speechless with terror, and only after a long while can he tell what happened. Caution and cowardice are two sides of one coin in him — and this is the great difference between him and Odysseus. Odysseus' caution leads to action: he goes alone, and with Hermes' herb moly he masters the witch. Eurylochus' caution stops at fear.

Mutiny: The Man of Iron

After the rescue and a full year of rest in Circe's halls, Odysseus orders the crew to return to the ship and then back to the palace to take their leave. At this moment Eurylochus delivers the most pointed public rebuke of Odysseus in the whole poem:

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"You're a hard man, Odysseus. Your fighting spirit's stronger than ours, your stamina never fails. You must be made of iron head to foot — look at your men, worn out and broken with lack of sleep, and you refuse to let them rest... and those men died through this man's recklessness! The great Cyclops — it was his fault too!"

He even urges the men to disobey: "Don't take me there against my will — leave me here by the ship." Odysseus reaches for his sword to cut him down, and only the rest of the crew, closing around their king, talks him out of it. Eurylochus follows in the end, trembling at Odysseus' threats.

The scene repays a close look. Eurylochus' charges are not groundless: the men are indeed exhausted, and the disaster with the Cyclops did spring from Odysseus' stubbornness. But Homer puts the same "human reasons" in Eurylochus' mouth and lets them become a mutiny. It is the poem's recurring structure: a legitimate complaint — the men want rest, want food — and a fatal shortsightedness — the warnings ignored, the cattle slaughtered — are separated by the thinnest of lines.

The Cattle of the Sun

In Book 12, after the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis, the ship approaches Thrinacia, the island of Helios. Odysseus, remembering the warnings of Circe and Tiresias, insists on sailing past — but Eurylochus leads the protest: the men are at the end of their strength; let them go ashore for one night at least. Odysseus yields. A storm then pins them on the island for a full month, the stores run out, and Odysseus goes off alone to pray — and in the moment that he sleeps, Eurylochus addresses the starving crew with the fatal speech:

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"All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals, true, but to die of hunger, starve to death — that's the worst of all. Come, let us drive off the best of Helios' cattle and sacrifice to the deathless gods... if he is enraged and wants to wreck our ship, I would rather lose my life at once, swallowing the sea, than waste away slowly on a desert island."

The crew approves. They slaughter the cattle and sacrifice; Helios appeals to Zeus in fury, and Zeus promises to strike the ship with a thunderbolt. When the ship puts to sea the storm breaks, the vessel is shattered, and every man is lost — Eurylochus among them. Only Odysseus survives, drifting for nine days, and on the tenth night is cast up on Calypso's island.

The Limits of Mortals

The significance of Eurylochus is that he gives the greatness of Odysseus a concrete point of comparison. He is no villain: his two defiances arise, one from fear and one from hunger — the most ordinary of mortal reasons. Yet the greatness of the Odyssey rests precisely on this contrast: the hero is not the man without weariness or fear, but the man who keeps going in the face of them. Odysseus is the only one who never touches the cattle. Not because he is not hungry, but because the warnings have become part of how he moves; the crew see only the hunger before them, and he sees the cost.

That is why the death of Eurylochus weighs so heavily. As Odysseus drifts, clinging to the keel, Homer does not have him mourn a single comrade — the whole crew vanishes as one. Eurylochus stands for the fate of that collective: they sailed with the hero, shared the storms and the shipwrecks, and again and again, at the decisive moments, chose the comfort at hand — and the law of the epic never forgives that choice.