Cassiphone and her tale do not appear in the Odyssey, the epic poem that narrates Odysseus' adventures, but rather she is mentioned in passing in the works of the Hellenistic poet Lycophron and the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes.
[4] Cassiphone is the daughter of Odysseus and the witch-goddess Circe whom he met during his ten-year journey back home following the fall and sack of Troy.
[1] Lycophron writes:[6] When he[a] is dead, Perge, hill of the Tyrrhenians, shall receive his ashes in the land of Gortyn; when, as he breathes out his life, he shall bewail the fate of his son[b] and his wife,[c] whom her husband shall slay and himself next pass to Hades, his throat cut by the hands of his sister,[d] the own cousin of Glaucon and Apsyrtus.
[e]According to Tzetzes, Cassiphone is the daughter Odysseus had by Circe with whom he spent one year together during his travels to get back home to Ithaca following the end of the Trojan War.
[8] The story of the Telegony, the lost sequel to the Odyssey, goes that her full-brother Telegonus left in search of the father he never knew, arrived in Ithaca and there he accidentally ended up killing Odysseus, as he did not recognise him.