Polypheme

Also known as: Cyclops / POL / POLYPHEME / Polyphemus · Family: Cyclops · Role: master · First appears: Euripides, The Cyclops — Scene 1

At Ætna, Polypheme is the master of Silenus and his satyrs after capturing them and reducing them to slavery. Poseidon is listed as his parent. When Silenus secretly barters Polypheme’s lambs and cheeses to Odysseus’s party for wine, Polypheme orders the strangers killed and cooked, rejects Odysseus’s appeal to hospitality, and declares that he will devour him. He also refuses to fear Zeus, regarding him as no more powerful than himself.

Polypheme kills and consumes two of Ulysses’s companions, but wine leaves him weakened and intoxicated: “By wine enlivened, he resolves to go / And revel with his brethren.” While he sleeps, Odysseus and the chorus prepare a heated olive pole and burn out his eye. Polypheme threatens to devour Odysseus last among the crew, then is blinded when Ulysses carries out the attack and reveals his true name. Polypheme is also a suitor to Ganymede, whose beauty he praises, and he calls on Hephaestus to free himself from an impious pest by burning out his eye.