Miller is clearly on intimate terms with the Greek poem. The character of Circe only occupies a few dozen lines of it, but Miller extracts worlds of meaning from Homer's short phrases. For instance, Homer cryptically describes Circe as having a "human voice," leading centuries of readers to wonder: What is a divine voice? Do the gods have a language? Miller makes Circe's human voice the beginning of a (fraught, because inherently temporary) kinship with mortals that is one of the novel's loveliest strains.