Polyphemus

Also Known As: Greek Polyphemos, “much spoken of,” “famous”; Latin Polyphemus
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A one-eyed giant of immense strength and appetite, son of the sea god, who herds sheep in a lonely cave and devours the trespassers he catches.
Role in Mythos: He is the man-eating Cyclops whom Odysseus blinds and escapes in the Odyssey, and whose curse, carried to Poseidon, dooms the hero to years of wandering.
Relation to Humans: To strangers who enter his cave he is a killer who eats guests instead of feeding them. In a second, gentler tradition he is a lovesick suitor of the sea nymph Galatea, and even there his desire ends in a mortal man’s death.

The cave smelled of curdled milk and penned animals long before anything moved inside it. Racks of drying cheese hung along the walls, pails and bowls stood brimming with whey, and the lambs were divided from the kids in tidy pens, the housekeeping of someone careful and entirely alone. Then the light went out of the doorway. A boulder the size of a house had been dragged across the mouth of the cave, and the creature that dragged it sat down by his fire and began, without hurry, to count the strangers he had found inside.

Polyphemus was the largest and cruelest of the Cyclopes, the one-eyed giants who held no councils, planted no crops, and obeyed no law but their own hunger. He was a son of Poseidon and the sea nymph Thoosa, herself a daughter of the ancient sea god Phorcys, which made him half divine and wholly ungoverned. The Cyclopes of Homer are not the divine smiths who hammered out Zeus’s thunderbolt; they are shepherds scattered across a wild coast, each keeping to his own cave, minding his flocks and caring nothing for the ships that pass. Polyphemus tends his sheep with real gentleness. He also eats men.

His name means “much spoken of,” and the tale that made him so is set down in the ninth book of the Odyssey. Odysseus, sailing home from Troy, put ashore on the Cyclopes’ island and went inland with twelve of his men to see what kind of host lived there, carrying a skin of dark, potent wine given to him by Maron, a priest of Apollo. They found the cave empty, its owner out with his flocks, and settled in to wait. It was a mistake. When Polyphemus came home and sealed the entrance with his boulder, the Greeks were trapped as neatly as the lambs in the pens beside them.

The giant asked who they were, and Odysseus told him only that they were travelers owed the courtesy due to guests. Polyphemus answered by seizing two of the men and smashing them against the ground, then eating them raw, bones and all, before stretching out to sleep among his sheep. He did the same at dawn, and again the following night. Odysseus could not simply kill him in his sleep, since no mortal arm could shift the stone across the door. So he worked at the giant with words instead. He offered him the wine of Maron, bowl after bowl, and when Polyphemus, pleased and drunk, asked his name, Odysseus said it was Nobody.

They had sharpened a length of the giant’s own olivewood staff to a point and hardened it in the fire. While Polyphemus lay in a wine-heavy stupor, four men and Odysseus lifted the glowing stake and drove it into his single eye, leaning on it and turning it the way a shipwright bores a beam. The eye hissed and burst. Polyphemus woke roaring, and the other Cyclopes came to the mouth of his cave to ask what was wrong, who was hurting him. Nobody, he bellowed. Nobody is killing me. They told him that if nobody was troubling him he had better pray to his father, and they went away. No one came.

Blind now, the giant heaved the boulder aside and sat in the gap with his hands spread, certain he would catch the men as they tried to slip past. Odysseus lashed his surviving crew beneath the bellies of the great fleece-heavy rams, three animals to a man, and rode out clinging to the wool while Polyphemus stroked each broad back and felt nothing underneath. Once aboard ship and pulling clear of the shore, Odysseus could not hold his tongue. He shouted his real name across the water, so the Cyclops would know who had done this to him. Polyphemus tore a hilltop loose and hurled it at the voice, nearly swamping the ship, and then lifted his ruined face and prayed to Poseidon: let Odysseus reach home late, alone, broken, on a stranger’s ship, with grief waiting for him there. His father heard.

He is drawn as a mountain given limbs, taller and broader than any man, strong enough to close his cave with a rock that a train of wagons could not have carried. The most famous thing about him is the one thing every version keeps: a single great eye set in the middle of his brow, the whole of his sight staked on one soft and vulnerable point. His voice carries like weather. In art he is often shown seated with a wine bowl or a shepherd’s crook, heavy-limbed and shaggy, less a demon than an overgrown and dangerous man who never had to learn manners.

There is a softer Polyphemus, and he is nearly as old. The Sicilian poet Theocritus turned him into a lovesick young herdsman pining after the sea nymph Galatea, perched on a rock and singing to the waves about how much better he would love her than any smooth-cheeked rival, if only she would come up out of the water. It is comic and a little sad, a giant courting the sea. Two centuries later Ovid gave the story teeth. In his telling Galatea already loves the shepherd Acis, and when Polyphemus finds the two of them together he snaps, wrenches a slab off the mountainside, and crushes the boy beneath it. Galatea turns her dying lover into a clear river running down from Etna, which is the only mercy in the tale, and none of it his.

His gifts are the plain ones of his kind. Enormous strength, enough to throw hilltops and to bar a cave; a giant’s reach and a giant’s appetite; the half-divine toughness of Poseidon’s son, and a father on Olympus willing to spend years avenging him. What he lacks is everything the sea god cannot supply. He cannot see cunning coming, and cunning is what undoes him. He can be made drunk. He can be lied to. His one eye, for all his bulk, is a single door that a sharpened stick can shut forever, and once it is closed his strength only helps him grope at empty air. The men he meant to eat walk out under his hands wearing his own sheep, and the last thing he can do to them is throw rocks at a sound.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Polyphemus?

Polyphemus is the most famous of the Cyclopes, the one-eyed giants of Greek mythology. He is a man-eating shepherd who lives alone in a cave, best known for trapping and eating members of Odysseus’s crew in Homer’s Odyssey before Odysseus blinds him and escapes.

How did Odysseus defeat Polyphemus?

Odysseus got Polyphemus drunk on strong wine and told him his name was “Nobody.” Once the giant passed out, Odysseus and his men drove a sharpened, fire-hardened stake into his single eye. When Polyphemus cried out that “Nobody” was hurting him, the other Cyclopes ignored him, and the blinded giant could no longer catch the Greeks as they escaped tied beneath his sheep.

Who were the parents of Polyphemus?

Polyphemus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the sea nymph Thoosa, a daughter of the primordial sea god Phorcys. His divine parentage matters to the story: after Odysseus blinds him, Polyphemus prays to Poseidon for revenge, and the god delays Odysseus’s homecoming for years.

What is the story of Polyphemus and Galatea?

In a separate tradition told by the poets Theocritus and Ovid, Polyphemus is a lovesick Cyclops who longs for the sea nymph Galatea. In Ovid’s version Galatea loves the mortal shepherd Acis instead, and in a jealous rage Polyphemus crushes Acis under a boulder, after which Galatea transforms her dead lover into a Sicilian river.

Is Polyphemus one of the Cyclopes who forged Zeus’s thunderbolt?

No. Polyphemus belongs to the Homeric Cyclopes, a lawless race of one-eyed shepherd-giants, not the three divine smith-Cyclopes (Brontes, Steropes, and Arges) who forged Zeus’s thunderbolt in Hesiod. The two groups share the single eye and gigantic size but come from different strands of Greek myth.