Loading this page…
Return homePlease wait while the next page arrives.
Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesCyclopes are one-eyed beings in Greek stories: divine craftsmen and immense builders, as well as the shepherd Polyphemus, who imprisons Odysseus in his cave.
Also recorded as Cyclopes, Kyklopes, Polyphemus
Odysseus could kill the sleeping shepherd. The thought lasts only until he remembers the stone across the doorway. Polyphemus has moved it easily; none of the prisoners can. They need the creature who is eating them to remain alive long enough to let them out. [2]
Read the manuscriptCyclops is the singular, Cyclopes the plural. Polyphemus is the individual who imprisons Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey; he is not the name of every one-eyed being in Greek literature. Hesiod’s named craftsmen and Callimachus’s forge workers occupy other stories. Their common feature gives poets an immediately recognizable body without prescribing what its owner will do. [2][1][5]
Odysseus and twelve companions reach the cave while its owner is pasturing his flock. They find cheeses, milk vessels and pens divided by the animals’ ages. The men want to take food and livestock and leave. Odysseus insists on meeting the owner and receiving a guest’s gift. Polyphemus returns, drives in the animals he milks and closes the entrance with an enormous stone. After his dairy work, he notices the strangers. Odysseus appeals to hospitality and Zeus’s protection of visitors. The Cyclops rejects that authority, seizes two men and eats them. [2]
Odysseus considers killing him as he sleeps among the sheep, then realizes that the stone would leave everyone imprisoned. The next morning Polyphemus eats two more companions, takes his flock outside and replaces the barrier. The prisoners find a great olive-wood club beside a sheep pen. They cut off a length, smooth it and sharpen its end. Odysseus hardens the point in the fire and hides it beneath the dung. Four men are chosen by lot to join him in the attack. The plan depends on their keeping their courage until the shepherd sleeps. [2]
That evening Polyphemus eats another two men. Odysseus offers the strong wine he has brought. Delighted, the Cyclops asks for more and for his guest’s name, promising a gift in return. Odysseus calls himself Nobody. The promised gift is to eat Nobody last. Once wine and sleep overcome the shepherd, the men heat the stake again, drive it into his eye and turn it. He tears it out and calls to the neighbouring Cyclopes. When they ask who is harming him, his answer makes them believe that no person is attacking him. They tell him to pray to Poseidon and go away. [2]
Polyphemus removes the stone and sits at the entrance with his arms outstretched. Odysseus ties the rams in groups of three, binding a companion beneath each middle animal. He himself clings under the largest ram. At dawn the shepherd feels the animals’ backs as they leave. His favourite comes last, moving more slowly than usual. Polyphemus speaks to it, imagines it grieving for his eye and wishes it could tell him where the culprit hides. Beneath its fleece, Odysseus holds on. The ram carries him through the opening.
Dickinson College’s commentary connects the Nobody trick with Odysseus’s changing relationship to fame. An unnamed traveller can learn about strangers before revealing who he is. The celebrated hero has a name to defend and a victory he wants remembered. Those needs pull in different directions outside the cave. His intelligence makes concealment possible; his demand for recognition tells Polyphemus exactly whom to name in the prayer. [9][2]
In Hesiod’s Theogony, Brontes, Steropes and Arges resemble the gods except for the single eye in the middle of each forehead. Their strength is joined to craftsmanship. Callimachus enlarges the impression: his workers resemble mountain crags, and their eyes are as broad as shields made of four layers of hide. Around them, hammer blows, bellows and groaning bodies make the workshop almost unbearable to visitors. [1][5]
Hesiod credits the Cyclopes with Zeus’s thunder and thunderbolt. In Callimachus’s Hymn to Artemis they are working on something less martial: a horse-trough for Poseidon. Their forge stands on Lipara, formerly called Meligunis, at the anvils of Hephaestus. The goddess Artemis arrives with young nymphs who cannot endure the noise or look steadily at the workers. The poet forgives them their fear: even divine children are frightened by a Cyclops. [1][5]
Artemis has behaved differently since infancy. Callimachus remembers her at three years old, sitting on Brontes’s knees and pulling hair from his chest. The bare patch remains. Now she boldly asks for a bow, arrows and a case to hold them, promising the makers meat from her future hunts. They grant the request. Their huge bodies can terrify a visitor, yet the goddess addresses them as craftsmen with whom she can make an exchange. [5]
The playwright Euripides puts his Cyclops at Mount Aetna in Sicily. Silenus, an older companion of the god Dionysus, explains the household’s extra inhabitants. He and his sons sailed in search of the missing god, only to be driven ashore by a storm and enslaved by Polyphemus. The sons tend the flocks. Silenus fills troughs, sweeps the cave and serves at the master’s meals. The satyrs who once danced for Dionysus now keep another being’s home in order. [3]
The travel writer Pausanias found another kind of Cyclopean work at Tiryns. He describes a surviving wall of enormous, unworked stones, with smaller stones fitted between them to bind the blocks together. Even a pair of mules, he says, could not shift the smallest great block. He attributes the wall to Cyclopes. The scale of the masonry makes extraordinary builders imaginable, but the surviving wall and its traditional explanation remain different kinds of evidence. [4]
Virgil’s Aeneid returns to the Sicilian shore after the blinding. A starving man emerges from the woods and begs the newly arrived Trojans to take him anywhere. He is Achaemenides, a Greek companion abandoned by Ulysses—the Latin name for Odysseus. He fought against Troy, but Anchises, father of the Trojan leader Aeneas, gives him his hand. The former enemy can finally describe the cave he escaped and the months he has survived outside it. [6]
Polyphemus then appears among his sheep, steadying himself with a lopped pine. He reaches the sea and washes his wounded eye socket. The Trojans bring Achaemenides aboard and row away, but the splash draws the shepherd after them. Unable to catch the ship, he roars, summoning the other Cyclopes to the shore. The rescued man becomes a guide along a coast he once travelled with Ulysses. His account has brought him protection from strangers where his own companions left him behind. [6]
Theocritus’s Idyll 11 addresses Nicias, a physician, with a remedy for love: music. Its young Polyphemus neglects his flock while longing for the sea-nymph Galatea. The sheep come home without him. Sitting on a rock, he sings toward the water, recalling when she came gathering flowers with his mother and he showed them where to look. The affection that began then has not been returned. [7]
He knows what may repel her: the long brow, the single eye, the broad nose. In their place he offers milk, cheese, young animals and his own music. His cave has trees, vines and cool water; why prefer the sea? He wishes he had fins, thinks of learning to swim and asks her to share his work. Finally he interrupts himself. He should fetch food for his lambs and look for a willing lover ashore. Singing has not brought Galatea to him, but it has given him enough comfort to imagine returning to his life. [7]
Ovid lets Galatea tell the story of a more violent lover. Speaking to Scylla, she remembers her love for Acis and Polyphemus’s unwanted pursuit. The Cyclops combs his hair with a rake and trims his beard with a sickle. He praises his body and central eye, but his song turns from gifts to threats against his rival. Hidden with Acis, Galatea hears him. When Polyphemus discovers them, she dives into the sea and Acis runs, calling for help. [8]
The rock Polyphemus throws buries Acis. Galatea can do only what fate allows: give him the powers of his river ancestry. Blood flowing from beneath the rock becomes muddy water, then clears. The stone splits, reeds appear and a horned youth rises from the stream, larger and blue-faced but still recognizable as Acis. He has become the river that bears his name. Galatea’s account ends with a transformation she could accomplish after failing to prevent the loss. [8]
A Roman fresco from the imperial villa at Boscotrecase presents another moment. Dated to the last decade of the first century BCE, the painting shows Polyphemus seated in a pastoral landscape, looking toward Galatea. The Metropolitan Museum’s discussion emphasizes the gentler shepherd among the sheep. The image gives his longing a place to remain, without forcing the viewer immediately onward to either the blinded eye or the thrown stone. [10]
A single eye does not make all these figures the same character. Hesiod’s makers belong to a divine genealogy; the wall at Tiryns belongs to a traveller’s account of ruins; Polyphemus changes as poets change his company. Beside Odysseus he controls a doorway. Beside Galatea he cannot command an answer. Theocritus leaves him considering the lambs he has neglected: a great body with ordinary work waiting to be done. [1][4][2][7]
The Odyssey encounter is read in A. T. Murray’s English translation, from entry into the cave through departure from the island. Callimachus supplies the complete workshop visit, Theocritus the complete love song, and Virgil and Ovid the later narratives. Euripides is represented by the opening scene of Cyclops. Pausanias’s masonry description, Dickinson’s commentary and the Met’s fresco discussion have separate roles in the account. [2][5][7][6][8][3][4][9][10]
Hesiod · Theoi Classical Texts Library · 1914 · Translated by H. G. Evelyn-White
139–146
Checked 2026-10-11
Homer · Theoi Classical Texts Library · Translated by A. T. Murray
Book 9, 216–566
Checked 2026-10-11
Euripides · Perseus, Tufts University · 1891 · Translated by E. P. Coleridge
1–40
Checked 2026-10-09
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-11. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑Outside, Odysseus frees his companions and drives the flock to the ship. Once offshore he taunts Polyphemus. The shepherd hurls a rock, and the surge forces the vessel back toward land. The men row away again and beg their leader to keep silent. Instead he declares his real name, his father and his home. Polyphemus now recognizes the fulfilment of an old warning: he had expected a mighty opponent, not this small man and his wine. [2]
He prays to his father Poseidon that Odysseus never reach home—or, if he must, that he arrive late, without his companions, in another person’s ship, to find trouble in his house. Poseidon hears. A second thrown rock narrowly misses the vessel. The survivors rejoin the fleet and divide the stolen sheep. Odysseus receives the ram that carried him and sacrifices it to Zeus. The offering wins no favour: Zeus is already planning destruction for the ships and their crews. The cave is behind them; its consequences are still at sea. [2]
Pausanias · Theoi Classical Texts Library · Translated by W. H. S. Jones
2.25.8
Checked 2026-10-09
Callimachus · Theoi Classical Texts Library · Translated by A. W. Mair
Hymn 3, 8–85, particularly 46–85
Checked 2026-10-11
Virgil · Theoi Classical Texts Library · Translated by H. R. Fairclough
Book 3, 588–691
Checked 2026-10-09
Theocritus · Theoi Classical Texts Library · Translated by J. M. Edmonds
Idyll 11, 1–81
Checked 2026-10-11
Ovid · Theoi Classical Texts Library · Translated by Brookes More
Book 13, 738–897
Checked 2026-10-09
Dickinson College Commentaries
Essay discussing Odyssey 9.403–408
Checked 2026-10-09
Department of Greek and Roman Art · Metropolitan Museum of Art · 2026-08-06
Polyphemus and Galatea discussion; accession 20.192.17
Checked 2026-10-09