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/
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.
