Odysseus has come out on top in his struggle with the Cyclops, but his victory is fated to be a hollow one.
Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English here.
See the illustrated blog post here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
