Reading Troy — chapter 59 of 74 · Odyssey, Book 9

Odyssey, Book 9 — The Cyclops Polyphemus (Day 33 of the poem's main action, continuing the same Phaeacian evening; Ulysses begins the Apologoi — the four-book inset narrative of his wanderings — covering the period from leaving Troy to the third year after the war)

Ulysses, asked his name at last, answers in formal style: I am Ulysses son of Laertes, famous among men for cunning, my fame reaches to heaven. Ithaca is a rugged island, sun-bright, the nurse of brave men, and there is no sweeter sight to any man than his own country. He will tell his story from the beginning — from the day the wind drove him from Troy.

The first landfall was Ismarus, city of the Cicones, a Thracian ally of Troy. They sacked it, killed the men, divided the women and goods; Ulysses urged immediate departure. The men would not go — they sat on the beach drinking and slaughtering sheep until the inland Cicones came down with chariots thick as leaves and flowers of springtime and killed six men from every ship before the survivors got away.

A nine-day storm drove them past Cape Malea. They reached the land of the Lotos-eaters — a peaceable people who offered the scouting party flowers to eat. Those who ate forgot home, wept to stay; Ulysses dragged them bodily back, tied them to the rowing-benches, and sailed.

Next they came to the country of the Cyclopes, lawless and overweening, neither sowers nor ploughers, who have no ships and no assemblies. The Cyclopes do not know each other; each lives in a mountain cave, a law unto himself, ruling his women and children. The Greeks first beached on a fertile uninhabited island a little offshore — wild goats running everywhere, a perfect natural harbour — and feasted on goat and Ciconian wine while smoke from the Cyclops cave drifted across the strait. At dawn Ulysses left eleven ships at the island and took his own ship and twelve picked men over to the mainland to see whether these people were savage or hospitable. He brought with him a goatskin of dark sweet wine that Maron, priest of Apollo at Ismarus, had given him for sparing his life — a wine so strong it required twenty parts water to one of wine.

They found a great cave below a high pinnacle, surrounded by a yard of piled stone and pine and oak. The owner was out with his flocks. Inside, cheeses on the racks, milk-pails and bowls of whey, lambs and kids penned by age. The men begged to take the cheeses and run; Ulysses refused — he wanted to meet the host and receive a guest-gift. They lit a fire, sacrificed cheese to the gods, and ate. Then the owner came home.

Polyphemus the Cyclops is no man who eats bread, but a high mountain peak, alone among the others. He drove the milking-flocks into the cave, dropped a great bundle of firewood inside with a crash that sent the Greeks scrambling into the dark corners, rolled across the entrance a stone no twenty-two four-wheeled wagons could have shifted, and sat down to milk his ewes. The fire flared up. He saw them.

He demanded their business. Ulysses gave the standard Achaean answer: we are Greeks driven from Troy by storms, suppliants of Jove who protects strangers. The Cyclops laughed. The Cyclopes care nothing for Jove. We are stronger than the gods. He asked where the ship was beached — Ulysses, sensing the trap, lied: Neptune broke our ship on the rocks of your coast; only we got away. The Cyclops did not answer. He reached out, seized two of the men, dashed their brains on the floor like puppies, dismembered them, and ate them raw — bones, marrow, entrails, everything, like a mountain lion — and washed them down with milk and went to sleep.

Ulysses drew his sword to drive it through the giant's liver — and stopped. The stone would still be in the doorway in the morning. Without the Cyclops to move it they would all die in the cave. They wept till dawn.

At dawn the giant repeated the routine — milked, ate two more men for breakfast, drove the flocks out, rolled the stone back across the door from outside as easily as a man fits the lid on a quiver.

Ulysses thought. A great olive-wood club lay drying in the cave, the size of a twenty-oared cargo-ship's mast. He cut off a fathom's length, had four men sharpen and char-harden it in the fire, hid it under the dung. They drew lots; the four were the four he would have chosen. With him, five.

That evening the Cyclops returned, drove all the flocks inside (males as well, against custom), shut the door, milked, and ate two more men for supper. Six dead now. Then Ulysses came forward with the wooden bowl of Maron's wine. Cyclops, take this — drink — see what we had on board. I brought it as a gift for you, hoping you would pity me and help me home. The Cyclops drained the bowl and asked for more. Give it again, and tell me your name; I will give you a guest-gift in return. Ulysses filled the bowl three times; the Cyclops drained it three times. He grew heavy. Now, Cyclops, you asked my name. My name is No-Man — Outis. So my father and mother and all my comrades call me, No-Man. The Cyclops's response was the dark joke: Then my gift, No-Man, will be this: I will eat No-Man last, and all his comrades first. He fell back drunk; from his mouth came wine and chewed gobbets of human flesh.

The five drove the heated stake into his single eye. Ulysses leaned on the top, the four below turned it as a shipwright bores a plank with the strap-driven drill, the men below pulling the leather back and forth and the bit spinning round and round. The eye-root sizzled as smith's water hisses when a great axe is plunged in to be tempered, with a shriek of steam. The Cyclops roared. He plucked the burning stake free, hurled it across the cave, and screamed for help to the other Cyclopes. They came running to the outside of the cave: Polyphemus, who is hurting you? He answered: No-Man is killing me by stealth, no man by force. They concluded he must be sick — no man is hurting you, so it must be a sickness from Jove; pray to your father Neptune — and left him.

He groped to the doorway, rolled back the stone, and sat with his arms out wide, hoping to catch any escapee. Ulysses thought again. He took the long-fleeced rams, biggest of the flock, and bound them in threes with twisted withies from the giant's bedding — under each middle ram a man, the two outer rams concealing him. For himself he took the great lead-ram and clung beneath its belly face-up, gripping the deep wool with hands and feet.

At dawn the rams pushed past for their morning pasture. Polyphemus felt along their backs as they went — felt the wool, not the men below. The last to go was the great lead-ram. The Cyclops stopped it: My ram, why are you last today? You used to go first to the meadow. Are you grieving for your master, who has lost his eye to the wicked No-Man? Ah, if you could speak, you would tell me where the coward is hiding. He let the ram go.

Outside the yard they dropped off, freed the others, drove the rams down to the ship at the run. The crew embraced them and almost mourned the dead aloud; Ulysses signalled silence. They cast off and rowed.

Then Ulysses could not keep silent. Cyclops, the man whose comrades you devoured was not so weak after all. Jove and the other gods have paid you for breaking the law of guests. Polyphemus tore the top off a mountain and hurled it. It cleared the bows; the wash drove the ship back toward shore. The crew rowed double. Out at safer distance Ulysses shouted again, against his men's pleading. Cyclops, if any man asks who put out your eye, tell him it was Ulysses son of Laertes of Ithaca. The Cyclops cried out: Then the prophecy of Telemus the seer is fulfilled — he warned me Ulysses would blind me, but I expected a tall and powerful man, not a little nothing of a creature. He lifted his hands to Neptune his father: if I am truly your son, grant that Ulysses of Ithaca never come home — or if it is fated he must, let him come late, in evil case, in a strange ship, alone, and find sorrow waiting in his house. He hurled a second rock that drove the ship onward toward the offshore island. Neptune heard him.

They reached the island, divided the Cyclopean sheep among all the ships (the lead-ram to Ulysses by acclamation), feasted till sunset, and slept on the beach. Jove rejected Ulysses's sacrifice of the ram, for he was already plotting the destruction of all his ships and comrades. At dawn they put to sea, glad to be alive, mourning the six men eaten in the cave.

Analysis

Chapter 0059 — Analysis

The Apologoi begin

Book 9 opens the four-book inset narrative — Books 9, 10, 11, 12 — that we call the Apologoi (the "tellings"). For four books, the third-person Odyssey gives the microphone to its hero. Ulysses sits in the Phaeacian hall and tells his own story, in the first person, from the moment the Greek fleet left Troy to the moment he washed up alone on Calypso's island. This is the longest first-person narrative in the Greek archaic tradition. The Aeneid will adopt the device wholesale: Aeneas at Dido's court in Aeneid 2–3 tells the sack of Troy and his subsequent wanderings, four books read through this lens. Apollonius's Argonautica will not — Apollonius prefers his omniscient third-person — but Dante's Inferno 26 (where Ulysses tells his own death) reactivates the device; Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is the device; Conrad's Marlow on the deck of the Nellie is its modern home.

The first-person frame matters. Everything we are about to be told for four books is told by Ulysses himself, in a court that has already decided to give him a ship. He has every reason to embellish. Ancient and modern scholars have wondered whether the strangest details (the bag of winds, the cattle of the sun, the speaking ram) are Ulysses's poetic embroidery or the poet's; the question may not be answerable, and the poem may not care.

The Cyclops as anti-hospitality

Book 9 is structured around three increasingly disturbing failures of xenia: Ismarus (the Greeks themselves the bad guests), the Lotos-eaters (a hospitality that destroys by being too kind), and Polyphemus (the host who eats his guests). The Polyphemus episode is the Odyssey's negative master-image of all the hospitality scenes that surround it. Every detail of proper xenia in books 1, 3, 4, 7, 14 — the bath, the meal, the wine, the asking of the guest's name only after the meal, the exchange of gifts at parting — is grotesquely inverted in the cave. The Cyclops sees the guests before feeding them. He demands their names before feeding them. He feeds on them. The "gift" he offers in return (I will eat No-Man last) is the inversion of every guest-gift in the poem. The full meaning of Alcinous's well-run Phaeacian court is felt by contrast with this cave.

The No-Man trick

The pun on Outis (No-Man) is the Odyssey's most famous bit of cunning. In the Greek the wordplay is doubled: when the other Cyclopes ask Polyphemus if no one (mē tis) is harming him, the negative-indefinite mē tis (no one) is also the word mētis — cunning, scheme, trick. Polyphemus complains he is being harmed by Nobody and by Trickery in one syllable. Ulysses's signature quality is mētis; this is the Odyssey's most explicit verbal pun on the hero's defining gift. Butler renders the play as cleanly as English permits (No-Man is killing me by stealth) but inevitably loses the second meaning. Lattimore preserves both halves with a footnote; Wilson opens the pun out (Nobody is killing me); Pope leaves it untranslated and explains it in a note. The pun is the meaning here.

The pride that destroys the trick

The poem's moral architecture is precise. Ulysses's cunning has worked. The men are safe in the boat, the Cyclops is blinded, the prophecy has been fulfilled at the moment the Cyclops did not expect (he expected a giant). And then Ulysses, his pride suddenly larger than his judgement, shouts his real name back across the water. The wins-by-cunning hero loses by hubris. Polyphemus prays to his father; Poseidon hears; the rest of the poem is the working-out of that prayer. Of the twelve ships that left Troy, only Ulysses's own returns; even that one is destroyed in book 12; he comes home alone, in a strange ship (the Phaeacian one), late, in evil case, to find sorrow in his house. Every line of Polyphemus's curse will come true. The whole poem is bent around this moment of pride.

Polyphemus as more than a monster

The Cyclops is not merely the gigantic cannibal. The poem gives him a domestic life: he milks his ewes in order, separates lambs by age, sleeps among his flocks, loves his lead-ram. His speech to the ram on the way out of the cave — why are you last today? are you grieving for your master who has lost his eye? if you could speak you would tell me where the coward is hiding — is one of the most surprising passages in Greek poetry. It is sentimental, tender, lonely, devoted, and immediately followed by the prayer that condemns Ulysses to a decade of suffering. The poem refuses to let him be only a monster. Polyphemus is the first of a series of figures the Odyssey will give an inner life to despite their function (Polyphemus, the suitors briefly in book 22, Argus the dog). The cruelty Ulysses inflicts is not on a thing but on a person; the moral price he will pay is calibrated accordingly.

The cave as womb-tomb

Critics from Joyce onward have noticed the obvious symbolism. A dark hollow, sealed by a stone, where men are eaten and from which they escape only by being reborn under sheep at dawn. The Cyclops episode is the structural model for every later "escape from the monster" story in Western literature: Theseus from the labyrinth, Beowulf from Grendel's mere, Sinbad from the Roc, Jonah from the whale, every horror-film final-girl-in-the-basement. The sheep-trick — the men hidden inside fleece, the giant's hands feeling the wool — is one of those images Western literature has not let go of.

Butler's prose and the speech to the ram

Butler is at his best in the Cyclops episode because the prose is uninflected and the action carries itself. The dismemberment is described with terrible economy (he dashed their brains out as one would dash the brains of a puppy). The speech to the ram is paced perfectly. The taunt and the curse have the directness Pope's couplets cannot match. The one thing Butler loses is the Outis / mētis pun.

What to watch for

The Outis / mētis pun — the verbal turn at the centre of the trick.
The lead-ram's speech, the most surprising tender moment in the poem.
The Cyclops's curse as plot-engine for everything that follows — the entire structure of Ulysses's wanderings is the working-out of this prayer to Neptune.
The three failures of xenia — Ismarus, Lotos-eaters, Polyphemus — establishing the negative pole the poem will measure all subsequent encounters against.
The wine of Maron — divine wine for a divine purpose; the same wine-as-weapon strategy will reappear with Circe in book 10 and at Polyphemus's drunken sleep here.

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0059 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

The opening of book 9 reaches all the way back to the Iliad's last act and the Posthomerica's sack-of-Troy books. Ulysses's first sentence in his own narrative — I am Ulysses son of Laertes, famous among men for cunning, my fame reaches to heaven — is the explicit kleos claim every Iliadic hero made by deed and few by speech. Achilles spoke this kind of line in Iliad 9 to the embassy; Hector spoke a version of it in Iliad 6 to Andromache; Ulysses says it to a Phaeacian audience that already half-knows the answer. The sack of Ismarus reactivates the Greeks-as-raiders identity the Iliad mostly suppressed — these men have been pirates as well as warriors for ten years, and the Cicones-massacre is one of the more morally inconvenient details in the poem. The Posthomerica's depiction of the Greeks at the sack of Troy in book 13 — slaughter, division of spoils, cassandra-rape, women-into-slaves — is the action repeated here as raid. Polyphemus's hospitality-inversion picks up an older Mediterranean genre of "monster-host" tales (Heracles versus Cacus, perhaps; pre-Greek folkloric monsters in the Aegean) that the Iliad has no use for and the Odyssey absorbs whole.

The Lotos-eaters echo backward into the broader sub-tradition of forgetfulness-drugs that Helen's nepenthe in Odyssey 4 first activated. Both are Egyptian-coastal motifs. Both turn on the question whether the suspension of grief is a mercy or a betrayal.

Forward echoes

The Cyclops's curse is the engine of the entire rest of the Odyssey. Every subsequent disaster — the bag-of-winds blown open in book 10, Circe's transformations, the Laestrygonians wrecking eleven of twelve ships, the cattle of the sun destroying the last crew, the seven years on Calypso — is the working-out of Polyphemus's prayer to Poseidon. The poem is shaped by this single curse.
The first-person frame of the Apologoi (Books 9–12) is the direct model for Aeneid 2–3, where Aeneas at Dido's court tells the sack of Troy and his subsequent wanderings; Virgil's choice to give Aeneas a four-book inset narrative is conscious imitation. Dante's Inferno 26, where Ulysses tells his death-voyage in the eighth circle, is a reactivation of the device; Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Conrad's Heart of Darkness descend from it.
The Polyphemus episode is rewritten by Virgil at Aeneid 3.588–691, where Aeneas's Trojans land on the Cyclopes' coast and meet Achaemenides, a Greek sailor left behind by Ulysses's escape. The Virgilian episode reads as a deliberate footnote to the Homeric original.
Euripides's Cyclops — the only satyr-play that survives complete — dramatises this book in the 5th century BCE; the satyr-chorus serves Polyphemus, Silenus negotiates the wine-trade, the No-Man trick is performed as comedy.
Joyce's Ulysses Episode 12 (the "Cyclops" chapter in Barney Kiernan's pub) restages the cave: a one-eyed nationalist barfly (the Citizen) launches anti-Semitic abuse at Bloom; Bloom escapes in a cab as the Citizen throws a biscuit-tin after him. The biscuit-tin is the boulder; the cab is the ship; the parallel is exact.
The lead-ram's speech has had a long afterlife as the moment that complicates the moral reading: every poet from Horace through Tennyson through Margaret Atwood has noticed that Polyphemus is granted an inner life at his moment of greatest pain.
The No-Man trick becomes the type of every linguistic-deception escape from a monster in Western folklore: the riddle-trick of Heroic-Age tradition, the Outis doubled as mētis, the verbal trapdoor through which the hero slips.
The Cattle-of-the-Sun-style failure of leadership is foreshadowed in this book by the Ismarus drunkenness — I told them to make off at once, but the fools would not listen. The Odyssey is also a poem about a commander who cannot keep his crew alive.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0059 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

Odysseus — "Ulysses"; the narrator of all four Apologoi books; in this episode he sacks Ismarus, escapes the Lotos-eaters, enters the Cyclops cave, devises the No-Man trick and the ram-escape, taunts Polyphemus and reveals his name
Polyphemus — the one-eyed son of Neptune; eats six of Ulysses's men, is blinded, speaks tenderly to his lead-ram, curses Ulysses to Neptune

Mentioned / off-stage

Poseidon — "Neptune"; named as Polyphemus's father, hears the curse that will drive the rest of the poem
Zeus — "Jove"; invoked by Ulysses as protector of guests; rejected by the Cyclops; rejects Ulysses's closing sacrifice
Apollo — named: Maron the wine-giver is his priest at Ismarus
Laertes — Ulysses's father, named in the self-identification (I am Ulysses son of Laertes)

Non-cast named figures: the Cicones (Thracian people of Ismarus); Maron son of Euanthes (priest of Apollo at Ismarus, gives the divine wine); the Lotos-eaters (peaceable forgetters); the Cyclopes as a people (lawless, no assemblies, each a law to himself); the unnamed lead-ram (the Cyclops's favourite, the vehicle of Ulysses's escape); Telemus son of Eurymus (the Cyclopean seer whose prophecy is fulfilled); Ulysses's twelve named comrades (unnamed in this book but implied — six are eaten); Eurylochus (not yet named, will return in books 10–12).

This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.