The Cyclops’s episode in the Odyssey is one of Greek mythology’s most famous monster stories. But for Homer’s original audiences, Polyphemus was frightening in very specific and culturally relevant ways
Inside the cave are cheeses, pails of milk, pens of sheep and goats, and all the signs of a prosperous household. Odysseus and his men have been blown far from home after the Trojan War. They are hungry, curious and used to entering strange lands. So they step inside, light a fire, sit down and help themselves.
Then Polyphemus comes home – a one-eyed giant shepherd. He rolls an enormous stone across the entrance, trapping the Greeks in darkness. Then he seizes two of Odysseus’s companions, smashes them against the rocks and eats them.
“It’s the iconic story from Homer’s Odyssey,” says classicist Daisy Dunn, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “I think when you’re growing up as a child and you encounter myths for the first time, the Cyclops is one of those first stories you come across, and it really stays with you.”
But for Homer’s earliest audiences, Polyphemus was monstrous in incredibly specific ways; not just as a huge, one-eyed, human-eating monster.
Odysseus is not entirely innocent
Odysseus and his companions have been trying to return home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. Storms have blown them off course, carrying them from one unfamiliar place to another across the Mediterranean.
“In the poem itself, it’s told with such verve,” Dunn says. “It’s so fascinating. You have Odysseus and his men – I think there were 12 men initially – arriving at the cave of the Cyclops. They are intrigued. They’re thinking, ‘We’re in another land.’”
Rather than waiting for the owner to return, however, they make themselves comfortable and enjoy the cave’s splendour’s. “They make themselves perfectly at home,” Dunn explains. “They go in, they light a fire, they sit around, and they eat the cheese.”
To a Greek audience, Odysseus has already made a grave mistake.
“They don’t know who lives in this cave, and yet they’ve done this. This isn’t proper in Greek society. You’re not supposed to do that. So this is the first error of Odysseus.”
In many ways, it mirrors the arrogant impositions of Antonius in Odysseus’s own home back at Ithaca, where he lounges in Odysseus’s wealth in the king’s absence. It’s an interesting moral flaw that Homer draws. Certainly, Odysseus is brave, intelligent and resourceful. But he is also proud, intrusive and dangerously curious.
That curiosity proves to be fatal, because the cave belongs to Polyphemus, one of the Cyclopes.
“The owner of the cave, Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant Cyclops, comes home, and he’s rightly furious,” Dunn says. “‘Who are these people?’”
“I think the Cyclopes are actually quite clever in some representations,” Dunn says. “Certainly you see elements of that in Polyphemus – the way he’s organised his animals and his cheeses.”
Indeed, his cave is not a random lair but a working pastoral household. Polyphemus therefore possesses practical skill, intelligence and even, in some traditions, artistic feeling. So what makes him such a fearsome monster?
Hospitality: the sacred rule he breaks
One of the Cyclops’s greatest offences is his rejection of hospitality.
In Greek society, hospitality – known as xenia – was a central moral code. People depended on the welcome of strangers. Hosts were expected to receive visitors, offer food and shelter, and only afterwards ask who they were and why they had come.
Guests, in turn, were expected to behave respectfully. It was a cultural expectation with mutual obligations. This idea of hospitality was protected by Zeus himself, worshipped in this role as Zeus Xenios, guardian of strangers and guests.
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Odysseus has already violated this code by entering another man’s home and eating his food without permission. But Polyphemus deepens the moral failing. Rather than offering food to his guests, he makes his guests into food.
Even so, hospitality is only part of the point.
The real reason the Cyclops is “uncivilised”
“In the Odyssey, the Cyclopes are shown to be completely uncivilised,” Dunn explains. “They’re represented as monsters, almost the antithesis of the Greek heroes who’ve come to meet them.”
But it’s not because of his violence that the cyclops is deemed to be so brutish.
“What’s really interesting is the fact that they’re described as being so uncivilised as to hold no assemblies and have no laws.”
For Homer’s original audience, this was arguably the clearest sign that the Cyclopes lived outside civilisation altogether. That’s because the Odyssey was shaped during one of the most important periods in Greek history: the formation of the city-states.
After the collapse of the Bronze Age palace kingdoms, Greece had passed through centuries of political fragmentation. By the eighth and seventh centuries BC, communities across the Greek world were increasingly organising themselves into poleis – independent city-states that would dominate Greek life for centuries.
These were political communities, combining an urban centre, surrounding countryside, shared cults, civic identity and institutions. Citizens gathered to debate public affairs, and lawmaking increasingly became matters of shared order rather than simply the commands of kings or powerful individuals.
“These are proto-democratic. They’re not democracies like you get from the fifth century BC onwards, but they do give a sense of men – because it is just men – building their communities and creating a sense of law and order. So for people enjoying these poems when they were first performed in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, they’d have said, ‘Okay, we’re the society with the laws. We’ve got our assemblies now. We’ve got these Greek poleis.’”
The Cyclopes stood as a rejection of those notions. Each Cyclops lives apart, ruling over his own household according to his own strength and appetite.
“It’s a slightly ridiculous concept to think of these great Cyclopes with their single eyes sitting around having assemblies and making laws,” Dunn observes. “That’s not their civilisation. It’s not their culture.”
Some scholars have read the Cyclopes as an expression of Greek attitudes towards the external world more generally. “Some people read that as being almost an allegory of how the Greeks viewed barbarians, strangers, or foreign peoples more broadly.”
“I think maybe that’s going slightly too far.”
The episode is a way of defining what Greeks thought made their own society civilised. The contrast that the Cyclops makes explicit isn’t between humans and monsters, but rather between civic life and existence beyond it.
Don’t miss our upcoming podcast series exploring the history of Homer’s Odyssey, featuring award-winning classicist and author Daisy Dunn. HistoryExtra members can listen to all four episodes from Sunday 19 July.
Authors
James Osborne is a senior content producer at HistoryExtra