At Pantheon Poets we have met Polyphemus the Cyclops as the renegade shepherd who honours no Gods except his father Poseidon and is prone to kill and eat visitors in violation of the ancient world’s code of hospitality to strangers. Now, in one of Ovid’s most engaging passages, we find him in love with a sea-nymph, Galatea, and torn by jealousy for the mortal that she loves, Acis.
Hear Ovid’s Latin and follow in English here.
Odysseus has foiled and blinded the Cyclops. From the frequency with which the blinding is shown in ancient art, from archaic Greek pots to grand sculptural groups made for Emperors, it was a tale that must have been universally known and loved as one of the greatest exploits of the heroes of legend. In the Odyssey, however, it also carries a much darker undertone. Not for the first time, it has been Odysseus’s outsize appetite for risk and his determination to meet the monster that put him and his men in danger in the first place. And by revealing his name to the Cyclops, and blasphemously mocking his father Poseidon’s inability to restore his sight, Odysseus has made another very big mistake. Poseidon has heard Polyphemus’s prayer that, if Odysseus is fated to come home, it should be with the loss of all his companions, on a ship that is not his own, and that he should find troubles in his house. Odysseus will soon find that curse beginning to come true as the Laestrygonians destroy eleven of his twelve ships with all their crews. He may come out on top in the end, but the Odyssey is as much the story of his disasters as his triumphs.
The illustration, by Arnold Böcklin, looks ahead to Odysseus’s long and lonely captivity on Calypso’s island.
Link to the story of the Cyclops in Homer’s Greek and follow in English here.
Beside their beached ships, Odysseus’s men celebrate his foiling of the Cyclops with a feast on the giant cannibal’s flocks. What they do not know is that Poseidon has heard the monster’s prayer for revenge, and that their days are numbered.
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English here.
Illustration courtesy of the British Museum, licence at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ .
For Odysseus, his revenge is not complete unless the Cyclops knows the true identity of the man who has blinded him. It is a fatal mistake …
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s translation here.
Illustration courtesy of the British Museum, licence at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The Cyclops can no longer see, but sits at the mouth of the cave, blocking the way to freedom. Again, the resourceful Odysseus has a plan. Hateful as he is towards men, the Cyclops shows a touching affection for his flock.
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English here.
Image courtesy of the British Museum under licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
The Cyclops comes to regret accepting Odysseus’s offer of incredibly powerful Ismaric wine as the Ithacans begin to fight back with a brutal stratagem.
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English here.
Image courtesy of the British Museum under licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
When the Cyclops lights his evening fire, he spots Odysseus and his Ithacans. In the fraught exchanges which follow, it rapidly becomes clear that they cannot rely on the monster observing the ancient world’s sacred code of hospitality, and Odysseus realises that, even if he kills the monster, he and his comrades are trapped in the cave. But the resourceful Odysseus thinks of a plan.
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English here.
The image, by Francisco de Goya, is of Saturn devouring one of his children.
In the evening, the monstrous Cyclops comes home to the cave where Odysseus and his men are waiting. They hide, while he tends his flock and closes the door of the cave behind him with a rock so enormous that twenty teams of oxen could not shift it.
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English here.
The drawing of the Cyclops’s arrival, courtesy of the British Museum, is by the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. Illustration by courtesy of the British Museum under licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Hear the story of the Cyclops in Homer’s Greek with an English translation at PantheonPoets.com. Starting today, we post the whole story from Book 9 of the Odysssey, one of the best and earliest travellers’ tales in European literature, in seven daily parts.
Why in the original? Because translations can’t convey the contribution that the sound of the ancient Greek language makes to the story, or the way in which Homer’s hexameter poetry sweeps the story along.
To do full justice to the performance of Homer’s Greek, a reader should have an absolute command of Homeric metre, which is irregular, complex and sometimes inconsistent, a native speaker’s pronunciation, the skills of a first-rate actor and a time machine to travel back to learn how the tonal aspects of the language – a bit like modern Chinese – actually worked, a question obscured by the passage of almost three millennia and subject to considerable dispute. We cannot claim all of these desirables, or indeed any of them in full, but hope that our careful research and best efforts will make the wonderful story worth listening to, and convey some of the narrative drive, drama and excitement that the Greek original will retain for ever.
Hear Homer’s original Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English translation here.