Polyphemus

Also known as: Cyclop / the Cyclop · Family: Cyclopes · Role: Cyclops · First appears: Fable 100

Life events

• Polyphemus falls in love with Galatea, abandoning his cattle and caves.(Fable100)
  • With: Galatea
  • “For that savage, and one to be dreaded by the very woods, and beheld with impunity by no stranger, the contemner of great Olympus with the Gods {themselves}, {now} feels what love is; and, captivated with passion for me, he burns, forgetting his cattle and his caves.”
• Telemus prophesies that Ulysses will take Polyphemus’s single eye.(Fable100 · 📍 Sicilian Ætna)
  • With: Telemus Ulysses
  • “Telemus, in the mean time arriving at the Sicilian Ætna, Telemus, the son of Eurymus, whom no omen had {ever} deceived, accosts the dreadful Polyphemus, and says, ‘The single eye that thou dost carry in the midst of thy forehead, Ulysses shall take away from thee.’”
• Polyphemus discovers Acis with Galatea and crushes him beneath a hurled mountain fragment.(Fable100)
  • With: Acis Galatea
  • “When the savage {monster} espied me, and Acis unsuspecting and apprehensive of no such thing; and he exclaimed:-- ‘I see you, and I shall cause this to be the last union for your affection.’”
• Ulysses blinded Polyphemus, leaving him enraged and sightless.(Fable105 · 📍 Ætna)
  • With: Ulysses
  • “but when your flight had saved you from a cruel death, he, indeed, roaring with rage, paced about all Ætna, and groped out the woods with his hands, and, deprived of his eye, stumbled against the rocks;”
• Polyphemus devoured two companions during a bloody banquet.(Fable105)
  • “I imagined that[20] now he was about to seize hold of me, and that now he was on the very point of swallowing my vitals within his own; in my mind was fixed the impress of that time when I beheld two bodies of my companions three or four times dashed against the ground. Throwing himself on the top of them, just like a shaggy lion, he stowed away their entrails, their flesh, their bones with the white marrow, and their quivering limbs, in his ravenous paunch.”

Fable 100

• admired: Galatea “For why, rejecting the Cyclop, dost thou love Acis? And why prefer Acis to my embraces?”
• enemies with Acis “The Cyclop pursued, and hurled a fragment, torn from the mountain; and though the extreme angle only of the rock reached him, yet it entirely crushed Acis.”
• with Telemus (interaction) “Telemus, the son of Eurymus, whom no omen had {ever} deceived, accosts the dreadful Polyphemus, and says, ‘The single eye that thou dost carry in the midst of thy forehead, Ulysses shall take away from thee.’”
• enemies with Jupiter “And I, who despise Jove, and the heavens, and the piercing lightnings, dread thee, daughter of Nereus; than the lightnings is thy wrath more dreadful to me.”
• with Ulysses (The passage foretells Ulysses's future attack on Polyphemus.) “‘The single eye that thou dost carry in the midst of thy forehead, Ulysses shall take away from thee.’”

Fable 105

• enemies with Ulysses “Oh! that any accident would bring back Ulysses to me, or any one of his companions, against whom my anger might find vent, whose entrails I might devour, whose living limbs I might mangle with my right hand, whose blood might drench my throat, whose crushed members might quiver beneath my teeth”
• enemies with Achæmenides “’Tis through him} that this life of mine did not fall into the jaws of the Cyclop; and though I were, even now, to leave the light of life, I should either be buried in a tomb, or, at least, not in that paunch {of his}.”

⭐ Constellation map → · 📖 Read the original → · 🗂 Character index → · 🕰 Chronicle → · 📍 Places →

Extracted from the original text of The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Made with Rho MD.