9.231-280

Herding the female goats and sheep into the cave, leaving the males outside in their pens, he blocks the entrance to the cave with a huge boulder, then milks the sheep and goats, finally putting a lamb or kid under each female to nurse. Half of the milk goes into baskets for cheese, the other half into pails for his own meals.

Polyphemus’ monocular face, huge size, and cannibalistic eating habits would seem to mark him as an apt candidate for chaos monster, embodying and/or effecting a scrambling of the usual categories that define proper order in the universe. But what the Greeks witness here sends a different message: nurturing husbandry, careful sequestering of his flocks according to sex, judicious apportioning of the dairy products, all aimed at preserving the orderly categories that will ensure a fruitful harvest of resources. The poet seems determined to keep the monster’s status indeterminate.

Such a liminal figure is useful for Homer, as for all storytellers, drawing our attention to boundaries that define ordinary experience, prompting us to consider why they should happen to be where they are. Proteus the shapeshifter, also a shepherd, performs this function even more overtly (Od. 4.383–24). Because he can assume the form of many other elements in the universe, other creatures and even water and fire, Proteus defies easy categorization. Menelaus is told that in order to find out how to escape from Egypt, he must restrain this “Old Man of the Sea,” as he is called, preventing him from changing form. He must, in other words, find the knowledge he needs by bounding out the myriad alternate shapes—and thus, categories of existence— that Proteus can assume, confining the creature to one kind of being. By putting limits around what is potentially limitless, Menelaus can produce the requisite knowledge. The entire episode is a symbolic representation of the Greek paradigm for human civilization, imposing human order on the untamed forces of nature to channel its power for human use. That the Polyphemus episode does not fit as easily into this paradigm underscores the fact that the poet is not in this case looking for clarity but rather a fruitful ambiguity that trains our attention on the question so often raised by Greek literature: what does it mean to be human?

The rituals of hospitality resurface as Polyphemus catches sight of the intruders. We might expect a violent response, but again the poet surprises us:

ὦ ξεῖνοι, τίνες ἐστέ; πόθεν πλεῖθ᾽ ὑγρὰ κέλευθα;
ἦ τι κατὰ πρῆξιν ἦ μαψιδίως ἀλάλησθε,
οἷά τε ληιστῆρες, ὑπεὶρ ἅλα, τοί τ᾽ ἀλόωνται
ψυχὰς παρθέμενοι κακὸν ἀλλοδαποῖσι φέροντες;

Oh strangers, who are you? From where do you sail the watery waves?
Do you travel on business, or wander recklessly
like pirates, over the sea, roaming around,
risking your lives and bringing evil to those from other places?

Odyssey 9.252–55

The monster is in highly civilized company here. These words appear, verbatim, on the lips of Nestor, one of the poem’s exemplary hosts (3.71–74) and again in the post-Homeric Hymn to Apollo (452–55), from the mouth of the god himself. As it happens, Polyphemus is only a middling host in this case, since the strict protocol, observed elsewhere in the poem, is for the host to make the guest comfortable with food and drink before asking who he is (See e.g., 4.60–64). Nevertheless, though frightened, Odysseus takes his cue from Polyphemus’s flawed civility, describing the Greeks’ return from war and its attendant miseries. They are from the army of Agamemnon, whose fame stretches to the heavens, honored for his success in sacking Troy. Since the Cyclops seems familiar with civilized discourse, perhaps he will be moved by the plight of men who fought in a famous war. Hoping to build on the leverage that fame might afford them, Odysseus pulls out all the rhetorical stops. He and his crew are “at his knees” (266), in hopes that he will give them a “guest gift,” as is the custom in civilized society. They are suppliants, under the care of Zeus himself, who honors suppliants and guests, avenging any wrongs done to them. We note, however, that Odysseus does not reveal his name to the monster, a familiar tactic that will be crucial to his survival.

Odysseus’ gambit here has a second life in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, in a scene much influenced by the Cyclops episode. Philoctetes, a warrior headed for Troy, is bitten by a snake at the shrine of Asclepius, causing a festering wound that will not heal. Odysseus convinces the Greeks to abandon him on the remote and desolate island of Lemnos. A prophecy ten years later predicts that Troy will only fall if Philoctetes returns with his famous bow. Odysseus heads an expedition back to Lemnos, which includes Neoptolemus, son of the now-dead Achilles, to fetch the abandoned soldier. As the play opens, we see that Philoctetes has had to survive by hunting with his bow, scratching out a dismal, lonely existence, living in a cave. The Greeks come upon the cave when Philoctetes is out hunting and, like Odysseus and his crew, proceed to explore:

NEOPTOLEMUS
I see an empty dwelling, with no one there.

ODYSSEUS
Are there things needed for making a home inside?

NEOPTOLEMUS
Yes, trampled-down leaves as if for someone living there.

ODYSSEUS
The rest is empty, with nothing under the roof?

NEOPTOLEMUS
There’s a cup, made from one piece of wood, the work
of a bad craftsman, and stones for making a fire.

ODYSSEUS
Those treasures you mention must be his.

NEOPTOLEMUS
Aha! Here’s something else: rags being
dried by the sun, stained with pus from some sore.

       Sophocles, Philoctetes 31–39

There is here, as in the Cyclops episode, a certain anthropological cast to the investigation. What kind of creature lives in such bare and solitary surroundings? When Philoctetes approaches soon after from his hunt, the Greeks are alarmed by the sound of his cries and stumbling footsteps. Is this cave creature some kind of primitive savage?

Philoctetes’s first words recall those of Polyphemus:

Hail, strangers!
Who are you, who have put in to this deserted land
that lacks a good harbor?

Sophocles, Philoctetes 219–21

In the exchange that follows, Sophocles presents his “monster” in an entirely sympathetic light, playing against the implications of the Polyphemus paradigm. He greets the strangers warmly, expresses delight at hearing the Greek language, “most beloved of sounds” (234). When Neoptolemus identifies himself, Philoctetes declares him to be the “child of the dearest father,” from “a dear land” (242). He is at pains to identify himself as a patriotic Greek soldier, not some frightening derelict. The rehabilitation of Philoctetes that begins here proceeds through the rest of the play, until he emerges as the divinely ordained hero who seals Troy’s doom. Sophocles has clearly thought carefully about the Cyclops episode, incorporating into his play much of the irony generated by Homer’s deceptively civilized cave dweller. And Polyphemus, like Philoctetes, will undergo some rehabilitation before the Greeks leave.

The savage returns in Polyphemus’s reply to Odysseus’s request for hospitality. Odysseus is a fool (νήπιός, 273) or someone from far away indeed, to expect leniency from him. The Cyclopes are much stronger than the gods and have no need to respect any of them, even Zeus. He will treat the Greeks any way he wants. Nothing we have heard suggests that the Cyclopes are in fact more powerful than the gods. Rather, Polyphemus’ arrogance primes us for the retribution we know is coming. As the episode develops, we will see that the norms of hospitality keep surfacing as paradigm against which the poet casts his complex meditation on heroism and the nature of human civilization.

Further Reading

Edwards, M.W. 1975. “Type Scenes and Homeric Hospitality.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 105: 51–72.

Lateiner, D. 1993. “The Suitors’ Take: Manners and Power in Ithaca.” Colby Quarterly 29: 172–196.

Reece, S. 1994. The Stranger's Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene, 123–144. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Thalmanν, W. 1992. The Odyssey: Αn Εpic of Return, 131–132. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Van Nortwick, T. 2015. Late Sophocles: The Hero’s Evolution in Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus, 43–52. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.