Polyphēmos

Polyphemus (pol-ih-FEE-mus), in Greek Πολύφημος (Polyphēmos), "the far-famed," is the man-eating Cyclops of Homer's Odyssey — the one-eyed giant shepherd in whose cave Odysseus and his men are trapped, and out of whose blinding comes the curse that shapes the whole of the hero's long road home. He is the single Cyclops every reader remembers, the monster of the most retold adventure in the poem, and though "Cyclops" names a whole race, in ordinary speech "the Cyclops" almost always means him.

The first thing to fix about him is his parentage, because it is easy to confuse and the confusion runs deep. Polyphemus is not one of the three great smith-Cyclopes of Hesiod — Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, the sons of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth) who forged Zeus's thunderbolt. He belongs to the other, later, wholly separate race of Cyclopes: the wild pastoral giants of the Odyssey, who neither farm nor make laws nor fear the gods. And his own descent is sea-born, not sky-born: Homer names him the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, and the sea-nymph Thoosa, daughter of the old sea-god Phorcys (Odyssey 1.71–73). That is why, on the family tree of this encyclopedia, Polyphemus hangs from Poseidon and not from the primordial pair — he is the god of the sea's monstrous son, and it is precisely because his father is Poseidon that the giant's prayer for vengeance can reach across the water and turn the whole sea against Odysseus.

There are, in the end, two Polyphemuses in the ancient tradition, and they should be held apart. The first and older is Homer's: the towering, brutal, brilliantly-outwitted ogre of the cave, all appetite and rage, blinded by a stake and a false name. The second, centuries later, is a strange and gentler invention of Hellenistic poetry: a shy, lovesick young Cyclops singing across the waves to the sea-nymph Galatea, the ugly giant who cannot win the beautiful girl. This page tells the Homeric monster first and fullest, as the tradition does, and then turns to the softer, later figure — the same one eye seen once as terror and once, improbably, as heartbreak.

The son of Poseidon and the sea-nymph

Polyphemus is a Cyclops, one of the one-eyed giants; but of what kind, and whose son, matters enormously, and Homer is careful to tell us at the outset. He is not a child of Uranus and Gaia, and not one of the immortal master-smiths who armed the Olympian gods — those are the elder Cyclopes of Hesiod's Theogony, and the poet of the Odyssey never so much as glances at them. Polyphemus belongs instead to the savage shepherd-race of Cyclopes who live on a wild island, and his own father is Poseidon, lord of the sea. His mother is the sea-nymph Thoosa ("the swift"), a daughter of the ancient sea-god Phorcys who rules the barren deep; she lay with Poseidon "in the hollow caves," and bore him this son (Odyssey 1.71–73). So the greatest and most terrible of the shepherd-Cyclopes is sea-born on both sides — a monstrous grandson of the old powers of the ocean. This descent is not a detail but the key to everything that follows: when the blinded giant lifts his hands to pray, he prays to a father who is a god, and a god of the very element Odysseus must cross to get home.

The lawless island of the Cyclopes

(Content note: the episode that follows turns on cannibalism and on the mutilation of the giant's eye.) Sailing home from the war at Troy, Odysseus and his fleet came to the land of the Cyclopes — a race Homer paints as the very opposite of civilised men. They "neither plant with their hands nor plough," trusting the unsown earth to feed them; they build no ships and have no shipwrights; they hold no assemblies for counsel and know no laws (themistes). Each lives apart in a cave on the mountain heights, "and each is a law to his own children and wives, and they care nothing for one another." Above all they have no fear of the gods and no notion of xenia, the sacred bond of guest and host on which Homer's whole moral world turns. Odysseus left most of his fleet on a wooded offshore island and took a single ship across to the mainland, and with twelve of his best men — and, crucially, a goatskin of dark, sweet, tremendously strong unmixed wine he had been given by a priest of Apollo — he climbed up to a great cave near the shore to see what manner of men lived there, and, half-hoping, to claim the guest-gift that custom owed a stranger.

Trapped in the cave

The cave was Polyphemus's, and it was full of the wealth of a rich herdsman: pens crowded with lambs and kids sorted by age, racks sagging with drying cheeses, pails and bowls brimming with milk and whey. Odysseus's men begged him to snatch some cheeses and drive off some of the animals to the ship and be gone before the owner returned. It was the prudent thing, and Odysseus refused it — he wanted to see the giant and to receive a guest-gift from his hand. It was the mistake that killed six of his companions. At dusk Polyphemus came home, driving his flocks before him, a creature Homer likens not to a man who eats bread but to a wooded peak standing alone above the others. He drove the ewes into the cave, and then lifted into the doorway a sealing-stone so vast that twenty-two four-wheeled wagons could not have shifted it from the ground, and set it in place, shutting the strangers in. When at last he saw them and asked who they were, Odysseus answered as a suppliant should, appealing to Zeus, the protector of guests and suppliants, who avenges wrong done to strangers. The Cyclops only laughed: the Cyclopes, he said, care nothing for Zeus or the blessed gods, being far stronger; he would spare Odysseus or not exactly as his own heart pleased. Then, without warning, he seized two of the men, dashed their heads against the floor until their brains ran out, tore them limb from limb, and ate them raw, bones and all, and washed the meal down with milk, and lay down among his sheep to sleep. Odysseus's hand went to his sword — but he checked it, for if he killed the giant in the dark they would all die too, walled in behind a stone no mortal strength could move. To kill Polyphemus was to be entombed alive.

"Nobody" — the false name and the pun on cunning

In the morning the Cyclops seized two more men and ate them for his breakfast, then rolled back the stone, drove out his flock, and — as easily as a man capping a quiver — set the great stone back in the doorway, sealing the survivors in once more. All that day Odysseus turned over a plan. In the sheep-pen lay a great green club of olive-wood, the size of a ship's mast, that the Cyclops had cut to season; Odysseus and his men cut off a fathom's length, sharpened it to a point, hardened the point in the fire, and hid it under the dung. They drew lots for the four who would help him drive it home. When Polyphemus came back at evening and had eaten two more of the crew, Odysseus stepped forward with an ivy-wood bowl of the dark unmixed wine and offered it to him as a gift. The Cyclops drank, and demanded more, and drank again, three bowls of the fiery unwatered wine, and it went to his head. Warmed and pleased, he asked his guest's name, and promised him a guest-gift in return. And Odysseus gave him the answer that would save them: "Nobody is my name — Nobody they call me, my mother and my father and all my companions." (In Greek, Οὖτις, Outis, "No-man.") "Then Nobody," said the Cyclops, laughing, "I will eat last of all, after his friends — that shall be your guest-gift." And with that he toppled over backward in a drunken stupor, sprawling, spilling wine and gobbets of human flesh from his throat as he slept.

The stake and the single eye

Now Odysseus thrust the olive stake deep into the embers until, green as it was, it glowed and was about to catch fire, and drew it out; and with his four men he lifted it and drove the burning point straight into the Cyclops's single eye. Odysseus leaned his weight on it from above and spun it round as a shipwright spins a drill through a ship's timber with a strap, the men below whirling it by both ends — and the eye hissed and seethed round the fire-sharpened stake, the roots of it crackling in the flame, exactly as red-hot iron hisses when a smith plunges it into cold water to temper it. The giant gave a terrible scream that rang round the rock, and the men shrank away in terror. He wrenched the stake, streaming blood, out of his ruined eye and flung it from him, and bellowed to the other Cyclopes who lived in caves along the windy heights around. They came running and stood outside his sealed door in the dark and called in to ask what ailed him — was some man driving off his flocks by trickery, or killing him by trickery or by force? And out of the cave the great voice roared back: "Nobody is killing me by trickery, not by force!" ("Ou tis / mē tis — no one — is slaying me.") And the Cyclopes answered: if no one is doing you violence, and you are alone, then this is a sickness sent from Zeus that cannot be escaped — pray to your father, the lord Poseidon. And away they went, leaving him. Odysseus's heart laughed within him, that his name — Nobody — and his own blameless cunning had so deceived them. The Greek pun is exact and deliberate: ou tis / mē tis, "no one," rings against mētis, "cunning, craft" — the very quality that is Odysseus's defining name in the poem. It is the man of mētis who calls himself Outis, and the giant is undone not by force but by a word.

The escape beneath the rams

But they were still shut in behind the stone, and blind though he was, the giant sat in the doorway at dawn with his arms spread wide, groping the back of every sheep as it filed out to pasture, certain the men would try to slip out riding among the flock. Odysseus had foreseen it. He lashed the rams together in threes with pliant withies, and slung a man beneath the belly of each middle ram, hidden by the two on either side; and for himself he chose the greatest ram of the flock, and clung face-up beneath its shaggy belly, gripping the wool with both hands, and hung there, holding on with a steadfast heart. So, one by one, the men were carried out under the very hands of the blinded Cyclops, who felt only the woolly backs of his own sheep and suspected nothing. Last of all came the great ram, heavy with its hidden man, and Polyphemus stopped it and spoke to it tenderly — his favourite, the one that always led the flock to pasture and to water and came home first, and now came last of all. Did the ram, he wondered aloud, grieve for its master's eye, put out by a vile man and his wretched crew, by "Nobody" — whom, he swore, he would yet destroy, if only he could see him? And he let the ram pass, and with it the man beneath, out into the open air.

The boast and the curse that drives the Odyssey

Once clear of the cave, Odysseus dropped from under the ram and freed his men, and they drove the plundered sheep down to the ship and pulled hard for open water. And here Odysseus made his second great mistake, the one that costs him everything. Safe on the sea but still within earshot, he could not swallow his triumph, and shouted back to jeer at the giant — mocking him that his crimes against his guests had come home to him. Enraged, Polyphemus tore the peak off a great mountain and hurled it toward the voice; it crashed into the sea just ahead of the ship's prow and the backwash all but drove them onto the shore, and the men rowed frantically back out. And still Odysseus would not be silent. Against his crew's pleading he shouted again — and this time he gave the giant his true name: "Cyclops, if any mortal man should ask you who put out your eye and shamed you, say that it was Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes, who has his home in Ithaca." It was the boast that turned a blinded monster into a mortal enemy, for now the giant knew whom to curse. Polyphemus cried out that an old prophecy had foretold he would lose his sight at the hands of one Odysseus — but he had looked for a great and godlike man, not a puny nobody who had mastered him with wine. Then he lifted his hands to the starry sky and prayed to his father: "Hear me, Poseidon, dark-haired holder of the earth, if I am truly yours and you are my father: grant that Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes, may never reach his home in Ithaca — or if it is fated that he see his own again, let him come late and in evil case, having lost all his companions, in a stranger's ship, and let him find sorrows in his house." So he prayed, and Poseidon heard his son. That prayer is the engine of the whole Odyssey: the ten hard years, the shipwrecks and the monsters, the drowning of every last one of Odysseus's men, and the swarm of insolent suitors waiting to be dealt with in his own hall — all of it unfolds along the exact lines the blinded Cyclops laid down outside his cave. The trickster's one uncontrolled boast bought him a homecoming stripped of everything but himself.

Euripides' satyr-play

The Athenian stage took the story up as comedy. Euripides' Cyclops — the only complete satyr-play to survive from antiquity — sets the same episode in Sicily, with the old satyr Silenus and his chorus of satyrs enslaved to Polyphemus and pining for the wine and revels of their lost master Dionysus. Odysseus arrives, the giant plays the gluttonous, godless ogre for laughs, and the blinding is staged as a broad, drunken farce; the satyrs, promised their freedom, cheerfully bungle every attempt to help. It is our best evidence for how flexibly the Greeks could handle even their darkest myth — the man-eater of the Odyssey turned into a figure of grotesque comedy without ever quite losing his menace.

The lovesick Cyclops — Galatea and Acis

A wholly different Polyphemus belongs to a later and gentler age of poetry, and it should be flagged plainly as a post-Homeric reinvention with none of Homer's horror in it. The Hellenistic poet Theocritus, writing in Sicily in the third century BC, made the Cyclops into a lovelorn boy. In his Idyll 11 the young Polyphemus is hopelessly, clumsily in love with the beautiful sea-nymph Galatea, who will not have him; and, having no cure for love but song, he sits on the shore and sings to her across the waves — cataloguing his one shaggy eyebrow and his single eye as if they were charms, offering her his cheeses and his flocks, begging her to come out of the sea, and consoling himself at last that there are other girls. It is comic and oddly touching, the ugly giant curing the wound of love with music, and Theocritus frames it as proof that song is the only medicine for longing. His Idyll 6 stages a friendly singing-match on the same theme, with Polyphemus now playing hard to get in his turn. The Roman poet Ovid (his version, and so Roman) took the story up in the Metamorphoses (13.750–897) and gave it back its cruelty: here the wooing Cyclops is spurned by Galatea for a beautiful youth named Acis, and when the jealous giant catches the lovers together he tears a crag from the mountain and crushes Acis dead beneath it — whereupon the boy's blood, at Galatea's grief, is transformed into a clear river, and Acis lives on as a Sicilian stream. This singing, jealous Polyphemus of Theocritus and Ovid is a literary descendant of Homer's monster, not the Homeric figure himself, and the two should never be run together: the older Cyclops is all appetite and the cave; the younger is all longing and the shore.

A monster, not a god

Polyphemus had no cult. He was never a god to be petitioned nor a hero to be honoured at a tomb, but a monster — a figure of story, of the stage, and above all of the vase-painter's brush. What the ancients did with him was not to worship him but to tell and retell and depict him, and in that telling he became one of the most instantly recognisable figures in the whole of Greek myth. His single eye, the stake, the wine-bowl, and the sheep were a kind of visual shorthand that any Greek could read at a glance.

The blinding in early Greek art

The blinding of Polyphemus was one of the very earliest identifiable scenes from myth in Greek art, and its popularity is itself a measure of how deeply the story gripped the imagination. It appears on the neck of the great Eleusis amphora of about 650 BC — Odysseus and two companions driving the long stake into the eye of the seated, wine-cup-holding giant — and on a swarm of Corinthian, Laconian, and Attic vases through the Archaic and Classical periods, the composition endlessly repeated: the huge seated Cyclops, the small determined men, the shared beam of the stake. The escape, too, was a favourite, with little figures of Odysseus and his men shown clinging beneath the bellies of rams. These are among the oldest myth-pictures the Greeks made, and they fix the episode as a story known to everyone, long before and long after Homer's text was fixed.

The Cyclops on the stage and in the nursery

The Athenian theatre gave Polyphemus a second life. Euripides' satyr-play Cyclops put him on stage as a comic ogre, and the fifth-century comic poets and dithyrambists returned to him again and again; the lyric poet Philoxenus of Cythera wrote a famous dithyramb, the Cyclops, that made Polyphemus a singing lover of Galatea and is thought to lie behind Theocritus's gentler treatment. And below the level of art and letters he lived the homeliest life of all, as a bogey: the one-eyed man-eating giant in his cave was exactly the sort of monster with which the ancient world, like every world, frightened its children into behaving. He belonged, in short, not to the altar but to the imagination — the painted pot, the theatre, the poem, and the story told after dark.

The oldest of ogres

Polyphemus receives no worship today and never did; his modern life is entirely a life in story, and it is an extraordinarily long and vigorous one. He is, in a real sense, the ancestor of every one-eyed giant in the whole later tradition — the fairy-tale ogre, the fantasy cyclops, the man-eating monster in the cave from whom a clever hero must escape by wit rather than strength. The shape of his story — the trapped travellers, the devoured companions, the monster deceived and blinded and then evaded by a trick — is so basic and so satisfying that versions of it turn up in the folktale of many peoples, and comparative folklorists group a whole family of "blinded ogre" tales around Homer's cave as their most famous member.

Polyphemus in later literature

The episode has been reworked without pause from antiquity to the present. James Joyce built the "Cyclops" chapter of Ulysses on it, turning the one-eyed giant into a bellowing, narrow-minded nationalist in a Dublin pub whose single "eye" is his bigoted single-mindedness. The lovesick Cyclops of Theocritus and Ovid had a rich afterlife of its own: the Spanish Golden Age poet Luis de Góngora made him the subject of one of the masterpieces of Baroque verse, the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, and the tale of Acis and Galatea became a favourite of painters and composers — most famously Handel's pastoral masque Acis and Galatea, in which the jealous giant's booming bass aria and his murder of Acis are set to some of the most beloved music of the English Baroque. From vase to opera to novel, both of the ancient Polyphemuses — the ogre and the lover — have kept their hold.

The name in the sky and the natural world

The far-famed name has also scattered itself, in the modern way, across the map of nature and the heavens. Polyphemus is the name of a large and beautiful North American silk moth, Antheraea polyphemus, so called for the single great eyespot on each hind wing — a wing that seems to stare back with one huge eye, the myth written on an insect. His mother Thoosa and the nymph Galatea have both been given to moons of the outer planets (Galatea is a small inner moon of Neptune — fittingly, a satellite of the sea-god's world), and Galatea's name lives on besides in "Pygmalion's" statue and so in the language of art. Polyphemus himself needs no such memorial: he survives, as his name promises, simply by being spoken of — the far-famed Cyclops of the cave, blinded by a burning stake and a single perfect lie, whose curse still turns the wheels of the greatest homecoming-story ever told.