Cyclops

The giant is groping at the backs of his sheep as they file out of the cave, and he cannot see. Around his ruined eye the socket is scorched. He feels the wool of each ram and lets it pass, and he does not think to feel underneath, which is exactly where the men are hanging. This is the Cyclops, and the famous trick that defeats him is a sentence: the monster who eats men is undone by the one thing he cannot imagine, a man claiming to be nobody.

Three Kinds of One Eye

The Cyclops is never quite one creature. The ancients kept three groups apart. Hesiod, in the Theogony around 700 BCE, names three immortal brothers, Brontes, Steropes and Arges, sons of Sky and Earth, who forge the thunderbolt that makes Zeus king and, in later tellings, Poseidon’s trident and the helmet of invisibility that Hades wears. Their names are their job: Thunder, Lightning, Bright.

Then there is Homer’s kind, a lawless race of cave-dwelling shepherds who plant nothing and fear no god. Their most famous member is Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon, who lives alone with his flock and his cheese on an island later placed off Sicily. The third kind is the quietest: the Cyclopes credited with piling the vast stone walls of Mycenae and Tiryns, masonry so huge that no human crew could have raised it.

Nobody

Homer’s version is the one everyone remembers. Odysseus and his men walk into Polyphemus’s cave, eat his cheese, and wait. The giant returns, rolls a boulder across the door that only he can move, and starts eating the crew two at a time. Odysseus, whose whole power is cunning, gives him wine he has never tasted and tells him his name is Outis, Nobody. In return the giant promises to eat Nobody last.

Then the men heat an olive stake in the fire and drive it into the single eye. When Polyphemus roars and his neighbours crowd outside asking what is wrong, he answers that Nobody is killing him, and they walk away. The crew escapes under the sheep.

The trick has a second layer that English loses. The word mêtis means cunning, and it is also another way of saying no one, mê tis. When Odysseus calls himself Nobody, the audience heard him call himself Cunning, which is his name in the poem.

The Eye and the Elephant

One question survives the story: why one eye. The most famous answer is the fossil one. In 1914 the paleontologist Othenio Abel suggested that ancient Greeks found dwarf elephant skulls, whose central nasal cavity looks like a single empty eye socket, and invented giants around them. The theory has been repeated for a century.

The problem is that there is no evidence for it. No Greek author mentions such skulls, no excavation ties them to a Cyclops, and the giants on the painted vases look like normal men with one eye, not like elephant skulls. Some vases even give Polyphemus two eyes. The likelier explanation is far more boring: one eye is easier to blind than two, and Homer needed the blinding to work.

The Afterimage

The Cyclops never left the Mediterranean. The Greeks placed him on Sicily and the Aeolian Islands, near the volcano, and every later giant in Western art descends from him. The Norse jötnar are his colder cousins, and the pattern of a hero outwitting a dim giant reaches back to Gilgamesh and the forest guardian Humbaba. The Cyclops is the oldest and cleanest version of an idea that refuses to go away: the huge, single-minded force that can crush everything except a mind.

What the record actually holds is two Cyclopes, not one. There is the immortal smith who fits the lightning into Zeus’s hand, and the shepherd who eats men in the dark and cries out for Nobody. One built the weapons of order, the other is the terror that order is built against, and both press the same single eye against the boundary of the world the Greeks knew.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Homer, Odyssey, Book 9
• Hesiod, Theogony (c. 700 BCE)
• Apollodorus, Bibliotheca
• Wikipedia, ‘Cyclopes’
• Spencer McDaniel, ‘The True Origins of the Cyclops’, Tales of Times Forgotten (2019)