You could sense that his everyday conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of speech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced modifiers.
Scylla is the personification -- the human representation of a non-human thing -- of sharp rocks and other objects along the coast. Scylla destroyed ships that came too close.
We don't say: " he" or " she" for objects, like you do in other languages, but we can use personification to describe and give things more of a quality.
In reality, it was just a modest pile of stones on a hillside, but Turner pumps up the melodrama, backlights the desolate crag, so that the castle becomes a personification of the defiant prince himself.