th his single ship, has to sail again;
whither next? He arrives at another island called AEaea, "where dwells
the fair-haired Circe, an awful Goddess, endowed with a singing voice,
own sister of the evil-minded wizard AEaetes, both sprung of the Sun and
of Perse, daughter of Oceanus."

This genealogy we have set down in full, as given by the poet, on
account of its suggestiveness. These names carry us back to the East,
quite to primitive Arya; here is the Sun, the God of the old Vedas;
here is Perse, curiously akin to Persia, which was light-worshiping in
her ancient religion; then we come to AEaetes, father of Medea, usually
held to be of Colchis on the Eastern coast of the Black Sea, whence we
busily pass to Hellas in many a legend, and from Hellas we now have
traveled far westward into Fairyland. One ancient story, probably the
first, placed Circe in the remote East; another, this of Homer for
example, sends her to the far West; a third united the two and told of
the Flight of Circe upon the chariot of the Sun from Orient to
Occident, which is doubtless a much later form of the tale, though
ascribed to Hesiod. Circe is of a higher ancestry than Polyphemus,
though both go back in origin to the sea with their island homes; she,
however, is a child of the light-giving body, and will show her descent
in the end. Her name is related to the circle, and hints the circling
luminary, on whose car she is said to have fled once. Here in Homer,
however, we may note an inner circle of development; she passes through
a round of experience, and seems to complete a period of evolution. She
must be grasped as a movement, as a cycle of character, if you please;
she develops within, and this is the main fact of her portrayal.

The preceding etymological intimations are dim enough, yet they point
back to Asia, and to an old Aryan relationship. Not too much stress is
to be put upon them, yet they are entitled to their due recognition,
and are not to be thrown aside as absolutely meaningless. By Homer,
himself, they could not have been understood, being traces of a
migration and ethnical kinship which had been in his time long
forgotten, and which modern scholarship has resurrected through the
comparative study of language.

More important is the connection between Circe and the two preceding
portions of this Book, AEolia and the Laestrigonians. We have just seen
how both Family and State cast Ulysses off, must cast him off, since he
i