Polyphemus
The Cyclops
pol-ih-FEE-mus
The one-eyed giant who ate his guests instead of hosting them, and whose blinding put Poseidon on Odysseus's trail for ten years.
The Story
Odysseus and twelve men walked into his cave uninvited, and Polyphemus rolled a boulder across the entrance and started eating them two at a time. The escape is the most famous trick in Homer: wine, a sharpened olive stake through the eye, and a name, Nobody, so that when the other Cyclopes ask who is hurting him, the answer sends them home.
It comes apart because Odysseus cannot resist shouting his real name from the departing ship. Polyphemus prays to his father, and Poseidon spends the rest of the Odyssey answering. Later poets soften him into a lovesick giant singing at the sea-nymph Galatea, which is a hard read against the cave.
Did You Know?
- The trick turns on a pun that only works in Greek: Outis means Nobody, but under negation it shifts to mē tis, which sounds exactly like mētis, cunning.
- The Polyphemus moth is named for the single large eyespot on each hindwing.
- One long-running suggestion is that the Cyclops began with dwarf elephant skulls, common in Mediterranean caves, whose central nasal cavity looks unmistakably like one huge eye socket.