9.116-160

No human hunters toil across the ridges, harassing the goats that breed unmolested. With no flocks and no farmers, the land lies unplowed and unplanted, though it could bear crops in season. Its soft, moist meadows, stretching down to the sea, would be good for growing grapes. The land is smooth for plowing, with rich topsoil. An inviting natural harbor offers an easy landing, with no anchor stones needed; just run the ships up on the shore until the weather is right for sailing away again. Once there, travelers could refresh themselves at a natural spring that flows at the head of the harbor.

In short, an apparently splendid place to settle, much like the island of the Cyclopes. But the Cyclopes have never been there, because they do not know how to build ships or sail the sea. They have not needed to master the skills that humans developed to compensate for being cut off from the automatic abundance afforded by the Golden Age. This point comes through strongly in the portrait of the island, full of optative verbs to describe what settlers could do with such a lush spot: growing crops, keeping herds, making wine. Two centuries later, Sophocles captures the civilizing spirit the Cyclopes lack in a choral ode:

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ
χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισιν
περῶν ὑπ᾽ οἴδμασιν.
θεῶν τε τὰν ὑπερτάταν, Γᾶν
ἄφθιτον, ἀκαμάταν, ἀποτρύεται
ἰλλομένων ἀρότρων ἔτος εἰς ἔτος
ἱππείῳ γένει πολεύων.
κουφονόων τε φῦλον ὀρνίθων ἀμφιβαλὼν ἄγει
καὶ θηρῶν ἀγρίων ἔθνη πόντου τ᾽ εἰναλίαν φύσιν
σπείραισι δικτυοκλώστοις,
περιφραδὴς ἀνήρ:
κρατεῖ δὲ μηχαναῖς ἀγραύλου
θηρὸς ὀρεσσιβάτα, λασιαύχενά θ᾽
ἵππον ὀχμάζεται ἀμφὶ λόφον ζυγῶν
οὔρειόν τ᾽ ἀκμῆτα ταῦρον.

Many are the wonders and none more wondrous than man.
He crosses the gray sea in the wintry blast,
passing under the engulfing swells.
He wears away the highest of gods, Earth
imperishable, unwearying,
his plough going back and forth,
year after year,
turning the soil with the breed of horses.
He snares the tribe of flighty birds
and the race of fierce beasts and sea-dwelling fish
in his nets woven in mesh,
man the skillful.
With his wiles he conquers
the beast that walks the mountains, taming
the shaggy-maned horse and unwearying mountain bull
yoking them around the neck.

Sophocles, Antigone 334–52

The images here all celebrate what Homer suggests the Cyclopes are too primitive to achieve, the imposition of control over natural forces to create civilization: cutting through the sea in ships, wearing away the earth by plowing through it, trapping with guile the creatures who live by the rhythms of nature, constraining the force of animals to channel it for human use. With characteristic irony, Sophocles displays in his choral ode the operation of hubris, of humans overestimating their own power to control the world. This illusion will be shattered at the end of the play as Creon’s world crashes down around him. We will find a similar irony in the Cyclops episode, subtly understated and part of a larger meditation on the trade-offs between the easy abundance of the Golden Age and the heroic energy that would compensate for its loss.

Once the Greeks land on this promising island, crosscurrents continue, as supernatural powers appear to augment the crew’s civilizing skills. Expert sailors though they are, they cannot see land because the night is dark, the moon shrouded in clouds. Some god, Odysseus says, guides them into the harbor. After a good night’s sleep on the beach, the men wander the island in amazement. Again Odysseus senses the work of higher powers, as nymphs, the daughters of Zeus, flush out mountain goats for them to kill and eat. The contrast between a life made easy by the largess of the gods and the creation of human civilization through the imposition of hard-won skills on the natural world continues to be blurred as the Greeks approach their clash with the Cyclopes. And behind that polarity lies another, central to the Greeks’ understanding of the particular place of human life within the larger cosmos, between inborn excellence, often characterized as a gift from the gods, and the collective power of learned human culture. The hero, with his outsized abilities and appetites, is often crucial to the survival of his community. But his extraordinary powers can also disrupt the group he is working to protect. Achilles is the best fighter in the Greek army, their best hope against the Trojans. But his willful demands to be recognized as preeminent eventually tear the army apart. When Hector travels back to Troy from the battlefield, he brings the war into the city with him, separated from those he loves by his fierce loyalty to his duties as a warrior. Oedipus, who defeats the Sphinx with his great intellect, unwittingly imperils the city he vows to save from plague by arrogantly refusing to heed the warnings of the prophet Tiresias.

Odysseus presents a vivid example of these trade-offs, since he is characterized throughout the poem as a loner, one who trusts no one and relies on his cleverness and duplicity to overcome obstacles. The series of encounters in Books 9–12 ostensibly portrays the Greeks negotiating various exotic venues, but in fact the needs of crew are always subordinated to the desires of their captain. The central drama pits Odysseus, with his indomitable will and great intelligence, against the forces that would keep him from his appointed goals. Because he confronts nonhuman creatures, Odysseus initially seems to embody the essence of what is human. But his impact on the groups he enters is almost always destructive, leaving us with an ambiguous assessment of the glories of civilization.

Further Reading

Dimock, G. 1989. The Unity of the Odyssey, 114–115. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Schein, S. 1996. Reading the Odyssey, 5, 14. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Thalmann, W. 1992. The Odyssey: An Epic of Return, 83–84. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Van Nortwick, T. 2008. Imagining Men: Ideals of Masculinity in Ancient Greek Culture, 2–4. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

———. 2008. The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds in Homer’s Odyssey, 47–49. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.