9.193-230

It is ἡδύς, “sweet,” (197, 205), θεῖος, “divine,” (205), μελιηδής, “honey-sweet” (208). When poured, its effects are powerful (210–211)

Like the savor of burning cedar and sweetwood in Calypso’s cave, the wine engages the senses, its fragrance floating around; like the seductive voices of Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens, it beckons those who approach, drawing them toward danger. As we have noted, the combination of fragrance, ambrosia, and shiny things is often associated with trickery in the Odyssey. Later, as he drinks and falls victim to Odysseus’s trickery, Polyphemus himself will compare the wine to nectar and ambrosia (9.359). Odysseus has had a premonition that they will meet a wild, strong man, ignorant of laws and good customs. Now he has a weapon.

Odysseus and his chosen companions arrive at the cave to find it unoccupied for the moment. The Cyclops, it seems, is out in the pasture, tending to his flocks. They enter the monster’s home and gaze in wonder at the tidy scene within, baskets filled with cheese, pails overflowing with milk and whey, pens crowded with lambs and kids, carefully segregated according to age. We encounter again the abiding paradox of the Cyclops episode: the loutish, dangerous creature is also a methodical, attentive shepherd. The interplay of civilized and savage behavior, not confined to Polyphemus only, will run through the entire episode, part of the poem’s anthropological meditation on the complexities of human experience.

The crew begs him to plunder the Cyclops’s stores and then sail away to safety. In retrospect, this would have been better, he admits (9.228–230).

The centrifugal version of Odysseus, hungry for knowledge and experience, even at the risk of endangering himself and others, emerges here for the first time in the hero’s recounting of his adventures. In the poem’s opening verses, Homer explicitly links his hero’s desire for knowledge and the suffering he endured (1.3–4). There, the pain is said to be in the service of saving himself and his crew. But here and elsewhere, as we will see, that goal gives way to Odysseus’s restless curiosity. His rueful admission here comes, let us remember, after he has lost all of his crew. Of course, not all of the losses can be blamed on Odysseus. Their lack of self-control got his companions into trouble with the Cicones and will lead them to ignore his warnings about the bag of winds from Aeolus and the cattle of the sun. But some of the dangers they encounter might have been avoided, had they not been sacrificed to their captain’s need to “know the cities and minds of many” (1.3).

These two urges in Odysseus, to reach home and to seek new knowledge, are not always in conflict. Finding out as much as he can about the people and places he visits on his journey, while hiding his own identity, gives him leverage as he makes his way toward Ithaka. Knowledge is, in this sense, power in the poem. Yet we cannot help but feel that the alter ego Odysseus creates for himself in the false tales he spins for Athena, Eumaeus, Telemachus, and Penelope, wandering the Mediterranean in search of adventure and riches, reflects something inside him that peeks out at moments like this. And the uneasiness many, including later storytellers, have felt about the end of the poem can be attributed at least in part to the feeling that the dutiful king, husband, father, and son who finally triumphs will not be content with staying home. Likewise, the tension between these impulses in the hero finds its analog in the larger structure of the poem in the coexistence of two different worlds: the Ithaka of Athena’s return story, where the centripetal hero can reestablish his kingship with all its attendant hierarchies, and the world through which the anonymous stranger passes, teeming with possibilities, wide open to all the vagaries of ordinary human experience.

Odysseus insists on waiting in order to see Polyphemus, but also to find out if he will offer them ξείνια, “guest gifts.” We know at this point in the poem that the issue is not simply one of manners. How strangers behave when they arrive in a new place and how they are treated are important measures of moral worth in the Odyssey. Despite a wobbly start, Alcinous proves to be an excellent host for Odysseus, as do Nestor and Menelaus for Telemachus. Even the gods observe the niceties, as we see when Hermes arrives unannounced at the cave of Calypso (5.87–97). We may feel that these matters are somewhat trivial amid dangerous encounters with monsters, but the background of the Odyssey is the 9^th century BCE in the Mediterranean, a time of considerable unrest, with wandering people uprooted from their homes. When night fell, there would be no anonymous hotel in which weary travelers could find rest. How one is treated by strangers could be a matter of life and death.

Is, then, the creature going to be a proper, civilized host, or a dangerous savage? So far, as we have seen, the signals have been mixed. Behind the episode lies a potent mythical paradigm. The figure of the “culture hero,” who battles against a chaos monster and by conquering it preserves civilization, is ubiquitous in stories across the Mediterranean, appearing as early as The Epic of Gilgamesh in the 2^nd millennium BCE: Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeat Humbaba, monster of the Cedar Forest; Apollo slays Pytho, a giant serpent, the rotting body of which marks the site of the god’s oracle at Delphi; Zeus conquers Typhon, a Storm God, and secures the rule of the Olympian gods. The story pattern appears in the Iliad, but in a more complex form, befitting an ambiguous hero. Achilles, cutting a gory path toward Hector, throws so many dead bodies into the river Scamander that its flow is blocked by corpses and the river’s god protests. Achilles dismisses the complaint, prompting the god to make the river overflow its banks and threaten to drown the hero. Hephaestus, prompted by Hera, starts a back-fire and drives the river back into its channel (Il. 21.209–382). Achilles begins as the chaos monster, clogging the flow of nature, then, with the help of the gods, becomes the agent for restoring order.

The echoes of this story pattern are more muted in the Cyclops episode, but no less central to its ironies. Odysseus seems at first a fitting candidate for the culture hero, facing the one-eyed creature, who eats his guests instead of feeding them, as a good host should do. But as the episode unfolds, we will see that the poet blurs the outlines of the story’s logic. Polyphemus, as we have seen, is a rather tidy monster in his own way, and Odysseus will prove to be a dangerous guest.

Further Reading

Dimock, G. 1989. The Unity of the Odyssey, 117–118. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Finley, M. 1978. The World of Odysseus. London: Harmondsworth.

Nagler, M. 1974. Spontaneity and Tradition: The Oral Art of Homer,147–162. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pedrick, V. 1988. “The Hospitality of Noble Women in the Odyssey.” Helios 15: 85–104.

Peradotto, J. 1990. The Man in the Middle: Name and Narration in Homer’s Odyssey, 53–58. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Reinhardt, K. 1942. “The Adventures in the Odyssey.” In Schein, S. 1996. Reading the Odyssey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 79–83.

Thalmann, W. 1992. The Odyssey: An Epic of Return, 36; 74–76. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 30–35. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.