Wandering Rocks: Homeric Parallel

In Book 12 of The Odyssey, Odysseus chooses to run the passage between Scylla and Charybdis rather than attempt the Wandering Rocks, which Circe describes as "drifters" with "boiling surf, under high fiery winds," remarking that only the Argo had ever made the passage, thanks to Hera's "love of Jason, her captain" (12:65-72; Fitzgerald, p. 223). Thus the episode does not occur in The Odyssey. The Wandering Rocks are sometimes identified with the Symplegades, two rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea that dashed together at intervals but were fixed when the Argo passed between them on its voyage to Colchis.

(from Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, "Ulysses" Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's "Ulysses" [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 260. The first numbers following quotes from The Odyssey [for example, 1:115] refer to book and line numbers in the Greek text; English translations, unless otherwise noted, are from The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald [New York: Doubleday, 1961])