Circe in the arts famous name indicates a whore and any who loves such a one loses his reason'. His English imitator Geoffrey Whitney used a variation of Alciato's illustration in his own "Choice of Emblemes" (1586) but gave it the new title of "Homines voluptatibus transformantur", men are transformed by their passions. This explains her appearance in the Nighttown section named after her in James Joyce's novel "Ulysses". Written in the form of a stage script, it makes of Circe the brothel madam, Bella Cohen. Bloom, the book's protagonist, fantasizes that she turns into a cruel man-tamer named Mr Bello who makes him
Leopold Bloom the name Blum. Bloom is introduced to the reader as a man of appetites: Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. The Bloom character, born in 1866, is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a Hungarian Jew from Szombathely who emigrated to Ireland, converted from Judaism to Protestantism, changed his name to Rudolph Bloom and later