Odysseus and the Cyclops

After Troy fell, Odysseus and his men set out for home. The journey was long and the seas were against them. They came one evening to an island they did not know. There were no fields and no houses, but the grass was rich and goats wandered everywhere, and at the head of a steep hill they saw a great cave with stone walls of fitted boulders.

Odysseus took twelve of his best men and went up to the cave to see who lived there. He carried a goatskin of strong wine that a priest had given him on Ismaros, the kind of wine that needs to be mixed with twenty parts of water before it could be drunk safely. They left the rest of the company at the ship.

The cave was empty when they came in. Inside there were folded racks of cheeses, lambs and kids penned by age, and bowls and pails of milk and curds. The men wanted to take the cheese and the animals back to the ship and leave at once. Odysseus refused. He wanted to see who the host was. He wanted a guest-gift.

When they had eaten some of the cheeses and were sitting in the cave, the master of the place came home. He was a Cyclops, a giant with a single eye in the middle of his forehead, and his name was Polyphemus. He drove his flock in. He rolled a great stone across the doorway, a stone so big that twenty teams of oxen could not have moved it. Then he saw the men.

"Strangers," he said, "who are you? Where do you come from?"

Odysseus stood and answered politely. He said they were Greeks, returning from the war at Troy, blown off course. He asked, in the way travelers ask, for guest-gifts and the courtesy that Zeus, who watches over guests, demands.

Polyphemus laughed. "We Cyclopes do not care about Zeus or any god. We are stronger than the gods." Then he reached out, picked up two of the men by their feet, dashed their heads on the stone floor, and ate them, bones and all. He drank a great bowl of milk and lay down on the floor of the cave and went to sleep.

Odysseus drew his sword. His first thought was to kill the giant where he slept. Then he stopped. The stone in the doorway was too large for any of them to move. If they killed Polyphemus they would die in the cave. He sheathed his sword.

In the morning the giant woke, ate two more men, drove his flock out, and rolled the stone back across the doorway from outside. The men were trapped.

Odysseus thought all day. By evening he had a plan. He had seen, leaning against the wall, a great olive-wood club the giant used as a staff. Odysseus and his men cut a long piece of it, sharpened the end into a point, and hardened the point in the fire. They hid it in a heap of dung at the back of the cave.

When Polyphemus came home, he ate two more men. Then Odysseus came forward with the goatskin of wine. "Cyclops," he said, "drink this, after eating man's flesh. It is a gift. It will tell you what kind of cargo we carried home."

Polyphemus drank. The wine was strong. He had never tasted anything like it. He drank again. He drank a third time, and his head grew heavy. He said, "Stranger, give me more. And tell me your name. I will give you a guest-gift."

"My name," said Odysseus, "is Nobody. My father and my mother and all my friends call me Nobody."

"Then this is your guest-gift, Nobody. I will eat you last of all."

He laughed at his own joke and fell down on his back, and the wine took him. He began to snore so that the cave shook.

Odysseus and four chosen men took the sharpened olive stake out of the dung heap. They put the point in the fire until it glowed. Then they lifted it together and drove it into the giant's single eye. They turned it like a drill. The eye burst and ran down his cheek. The giant woke roaring, ripped the stake out, and stumbled around the cave swinging his great hands. The men hid behind the rocks and the animals, and he could not catch them.

Polyphemus screamed for the other Cyclopes who lived nearby. They came up to the door of his cave and called through the stone: "Polyphemus, what is wrong? Is someone killing you? Is someone stealing your flocks?"

Polyphemus shouted: "Nobody is killing me. Nobody is hurting me."

The other Cyclopes laughed. "If nobody is hurting you, you must be sick. Pray to your father Poseidon." And they went away.

In the morning Polyphemus rolled the stone aside to let his sheep out, but he sat at the doorway with his hands stretched across, feeling each animal as it went past. He hoped to catch the men trying to escape.

Odysseus had thought of this too. He took the largest rams and tied them together in groups of three with willow withes. Each man hid under the belly of the middle ram, holding on with his hands and his feet. Odysseus took the largest ram of all for himself and clung to its underside. The rams walked out, and Polyphemus felt their backs and never thought to feel underneath them.

When they were down on the shore, Odysseus untied his men and they ran for the ship. They drove the rams aboard. They pushed off and rowed.

When they were out of arrow's reach, Odysseus could not stop himself. He shouted back at the cave: "Cyclops, if anyone asks who blinded you, tell them it was Odysseus, son of Laertes, lord of Ithaca."

Polyphemus heard the name. He raised his hands to the sky. "Father Poseidon, lord of the sea, hear me. If I am truly your son, do not let Odysseus reach his home. Or, if he must, let him come home late, and alone, after losing all his companions, on a strange ship, and let him find trouble in his house."

He picked up a great rock and threw it. It nearly broke the ship in pieces. The men rowed harder. They got away.

But Poseidon heard his son's prayer. From that day, every storm and every wrong wind on the sea was waiting for Odysseus. It would be ten years before he saw Ithaca again, and he would come home alone, and what he would find there would be another story.