Polyphemus and the Cyclopes: Smiths, Masons and a Lovesick Shepherd

On a clear January night, Orion stands over the southern horizon, the brightest figure in the Canadian winter sky. In one old Greek story he was a son of Poseidon, a giant who could stride through the sea, and he was blinded; he found his sight again by walking east until the rising Sun healed his eyes. Polyphemus was also a son of Poseidon, also a giant, and also blinded, but nobody gave him a cure or a place among the stars. What his family did leave in the sky is smaller and much further south: a little altar of stars that Greek writers said the Cyclopes had built. To meet Polyphemus properly, it helps to meet his relatives first.

Thunder, Lightning and Flash

In Hesiod’s Theogony, the first Cyclopes are not shepherds at all. They are children of Earth and Sky, born alongside the Titans: Brontes, Steropes and stubborn-hearted Arges, whose names mean Thunder, Lightning and Flash. They gave Zeus his thunder and made his thunderbolt. In everything else they were like the gods, Hesiod says, except that a single eye sat in the middle of each forehead, and that round eye gave them their name, Kyklopes, “round-eyes”. Strength, force and skill, he adds, were in their works.

Their father Uranus hid his children in the depths of the earth until Zeus set them free, and in gratitude they handed him the weapon that would win the war against the Titans. The Library of Apollodorus expands the gift into a set: a thunderbolt for Zeus, a trident for Poseidon, a helmet for Hades. The Latin astronomical handbook that goes under the name of Hyginus adds one more piece of work. Before the war, the gods swore their alliance over an altar, and the Cyclopes made it. Zeus set it among the stars as Ara, the Altar, below the tail of the Scorpion and too far south ever to rise over Canada.

In one strand of the tradition the smiths came to a violent end: when Zeus struck down the healer Asclepius for raising the dead, Apollo killed the Cyclopes who had forged the thunderbolt, and was sent to serve the mortal king Admetus as punishment. Roman poets kept them hammering all the same. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Brontes, Steropes and Pyracmon sweat in Vulcan’s forge beneath a volcanic island, half-way through a thunderbolt for Jupiter, when they are ordered to make armour for Aeneas instead.

Walls no mortal could lift

Travellers in the Argolid met a third kind of Cyclops: the builder. The walls of Tiryns and Mycenae are made of limestone blocks so huge that later Greeks could not believe ordinary people had moved them. Pausanias, touring Greece in the second century CE, says the wall of Tiryns is the work of the Cyclopes, built of unworked stones so large that a pair of mules could not shift even the smallest. At Mycenae he describes the gate crowned with lions and repeats the tradition that the Cyclopes built those walls too, as they had built Tiryns for King Proetus. Apollodorus agrees about Proetus, and the geographer Strabo adds that seven Cyclopes came from Lycia to do the work, earning their food by their hands.

Archaeologists still call this kind of masonry Cyclopean. The walls belong to the Late Bronze Age and the world of the Mycenaean palaces; the Lion Gate is usually dated to the thirteenth century BCE. By Homer’s day they were already ancient ruins, and the one-eyed giants were the best explanation anyone had for them.

Nobody in the cave

Homer’s Cyclopes are different again. In book 9 of the Odyssey they are a race of shepherds with no assemblies and no laws, who neither sow nor reap but live in hollow caves on the mountaintops, each ruling his own wife and children. The mightiest of them, Polyphemus, is the son of Poseidon and the sea nymph Thoosa, daughter of Phorcys. The poem gives that lineage in its very first book, because Poseidon’s anger over his son drives the whole story.

Odysseus enters the cave with twelve men and a goatskin of dark, strong wine. They find baskets heavy with cheese and pens crowded with lambs and kids. The giant comes home at evening, drives in his flock and blocks the doorway with a stone that twenty-two four-wheeled wagons could not have shifted. He eats two men for supper, two more at dawn and two more the next evening. Then Odysseus offers him the wine. Polyphemus asks his name and is told it is Outis, Nobody. In return he promises a guest-gift: he will eat Nobody last.

When the giant sinks into a drunken sleep, the Greeks heat a sharpened olive-wood stake in the embers and drive it into his eye. Homer compares the hiss of the burning eye to a smith tempering an axe, a simile that quietly remembers who the first Cyclopes were. The neighbours come running, hear that “Nobody” is hurting him, and go home advising him to pray to his father Poseidon. The poem enjoys the joke: in Greek, “if no one”, mē tis, sounds just like mētis, cunning, the quality Odysseus is famous for.

At dawn the men escape tied beneath the rams, Odysseus clinging to the belly of the great ram, which Polyphemus stops at the door to speak to with real tenderness. From his ship Odysseus cannot resist shouting his true name. The giant remembers an old prophecy and prays to his father: let him come home late, in misery, without his companions, on another man’s ship, and find trouble in his house. Poseidon hears. Every danger that follows, the strait of Scylla and Charybdis among them, lies on a route bent by that prayer.

A shepherd sings to the sea

Polyphemus found a second life centuries later in Sicily, by then firmly identified as the land of the Cyclopes under Mount Etna. Philoxenus of Cythera wrote a celebrated, now lost, lyric piece in which the Cyclops loves the sea nymph Galatea, and Theocritus, writing in the third century BCE, made the theme his own. In Idyll 11, addressed to a doctor friend, he says there is no medicine for love except song, and offers the young Polyphemus as proof: the giant sits on a rock and sings out to sea to the Nereid who will not come ashore.

O white Galatea, why do you push away the one who loves you, whiter than pressed curds to look at, softer than a lamb, friskier than a calf, glossier than the unripe grape?

Theocritus, Idyll 11 (our rendering)

He offers her cheeses, eleven fawns and four bear cubs, and wishes he had been born with gills so he could dive down and kiss her hand. In the end he talks himself round: better to weave baskets, cut greens for his lambs and find another girl. Theocritus leaves him lovesick but harmless.

Ovid does not. In book 13 of the Metamorphoses, Galatea tells the story herself while Scylla, not yet a monster, combs her hair. She loved Acis, son of Faunus and a river nymph. Polyphemus combed his hair with a rake and trimmed his beard with a sickle to please her. When the seer Telemus warned him that Ulysses would take his one eye, he laughed and said another had already taken it. Then he sang her a long, comic catalogue of her charms and cruelties, caught the lovers together and hurled a piece of the mountain. Acis, crushed beneath it, became a river running out from under the rock.

Galatea is one of the fifty daughters of Nereus, whose story runs from Hesiod’s catalogue to the Nereids of later Greek folk belief. Polyphemus never reached the stars, but on a winter evening you can look south at his half-brother Orion, and in our Sky Atlas find the altar his kin built for the gods.