Polyphemus

• 1. A Name Full of Songs

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  Polyphemus is a one-eyed giant, the son of Poseidon and a mother named Thoosa. Greek myth counts him among the Cyclopes, and Homer's Odyssey is where he first appears. His name is a small puzzle. It can mean "abounding in songs and legends," "many-voiced," or "very famous." Those meanings sound like a joke when set beside the man-eater Homer describes. Yet the name turned out to fit. Poets in Greece and Rome kept coming back to him, and so did painters, sculptors and opera composers for two thousand years afterward. How did a savage who devours sailors become a character who sings? Why does his cave story seem to turn up almost everywhere on earth? And what made each age reshape him in its own image?

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• 2. The Cave

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  Odysseus is sailing home from the Trojan War when he lands on the island of the Cyclopes. He and some of his men walk into a cave stocked with provisions. The owner arrives with his flocks, seals the entrance with an enormous stone, and ignores every custom of hospitality. He eats two of the men that evening. The next morning he eats two more before taking his sheep out to graze. By the end of the second evening, six of Odysseus's companions are dead.

  Then Odysseus tries a trick. He offers the giant some strong, undiluted wine that he was given earlier on his travels. Drunk and careless, Polyphemus asks his guest's name and promises a gift in return. Odysseus answers "Nobody." The giant says he will eat Nobody last of all, and he falls into a drunken sleep.

  Odysseus and his men have already hardened a wooden stake in the fire. They heat it until it glows and drive it into the giant's eye. Polyphemus screams for help from the other giants nearby, crying that Nobody has hurt him. They assume some divine power is tormenting him and advise him to pray.

  In the morning the blind giant lets his sheep out and feels along each animal's back, checking for escaping men. It fails. Odysseus and his crew are tied beneath the bellies of the sheep. Once safely aboard ship, Odysseus cannot resist shouting out his real name. That act of hubris will cost him later. Polyphemus prays to his father Poseidon for vengeance and hurls huge rocks toward the vessel, which Odysseus narrowly avoids.

  But the cave scene may not have started with Homer at all.

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• 3. Older Than Homer

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  In 1857, Wilhelm Grimm gathered versions of a Polyphemus-like tale in Serbian, Romanian, Estonian, Finnish, Russian and German. Others exist in Basque, Sámi, Lithuanian, Gascon, Syriac and Celtic traditions. Scholars have since identified more than two hundred versions from around twenty five nations. They stretch from Iceland, Ireland, England and Portugal to Africa, Arabia, Turkey, Russia and Korea.

  The current scholarly consensus is that these tales preserve traditions older than Homer. One more daring theory reaches much further back, to the Paleolithic. It links the giant to an ancient guardian figure called the lord of animals. Similar stories have also been recorded among several indigenous peoples of North America.

  Folklorists treat the blinding as a story type with its own catalogue entry. In the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index it carries the number ATU 1137, under the title "The Ogre Blinded (Polyphemus)." Folklorists also use the German label Polyphemsage.

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• 4. Satyrs and Aeneas

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  Euripides, writing in the 5th century BC, turned the cave into a comedy. His play Cyclops is a satyr play, and a chorus of satyrs lightens the grim business of punishing a host who broke the rules of hospitality. This Polyphemus is polished and clever, a figure that echoes the sophists of Euripides' own day. Both he and Odysseus argue slyly and twist words to suit themselves.

  Here the giant keeps the satyr Silenus and his sons as slaves on Mount Etna in Sicily. He calls Silenus "my Ganymede," which is absurd, since Silenus is far too old to play a young beloved. The giant is drunk while he explains his desires, and even the wooden stake becomes part of the joke.

  Virgil gives the giant a very different mood in his Latin epic. Aeneas and his men meet Achaemenides, a man Odysseus's crew left behind, who retells the escape. Then they see the blind giant coming down to the sea with his flocks. He leans on a lopped pine tree as a walking staff. At the water he washes his bloody eye socket and groans.

  Achaemenides is hauled aboard, and Polyphemus lurches after the departing ship. His roar of frustration draws the other Cyclopes down to the shore, and Aeneas pulls away in fear.

  Long before Virgil, though, another poet had given the giant something Homer never did, a love interest.

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• 5. A Lovesick Giant

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  Philoxenus of Cythera lived more than three centuries after the Odyssey is thought to have been composed. He wrote a poem called Cyclops or Galatea for performance as a dithyramb, and only fragments survive. It was perhaps the first to give Polyphemus a female love, the sea nymph Galatea. His giant is no cave-dwelling brute. He has flaws, he is skilled at literary criticism, and he understands people, rather like Odysseus himself.

  The poem must predate 388 BC, when Aristophanes parodied it, and probably follows 406 BC, when Dionysius I became tyrant of Syracuse. Philoxenus lived in that city as the tyrant's court poet. Ancient commentators say he was jailed in the quarries. The cause was either his frank opinion of Dionysius's poetry or a quarrel over an aulos player named Galatea.

  According to this tale, he wrote the Cyclops in prison as a poem in code. Polyphemus stood for Dionysius, Odysseus for Philoxenus, and Galatea for the aulos player. His giant played the cithara, a demanding professional lyre. A Cyclops with such a refined instrument would have startled his audience. Aristotle's Poetics later cites the Cyclops of Philoxenus, and one by Timotheus, as comic examples.

  Aristophanes mocked the poem in Plutus, his last surviving play. The slave Cario tells the chorus that his master has brought home the god Wealth, so they will all be rich. To lead them in a celebratory dance, Cario plays Polyphemus and casts the chorus as sheep and goats. He imitates the sound of a lyre as he does it. The chorus refuses. They would rather be Odysseus's men, and they threaten to blind Cario with a wooden stake.

  The romance did not die. Theocritus, credited with inventing pastoral poetry, retold it in Idyll XI of his Idylls. His Polyphemus is no longer wicked but absurd and lovesick. Galatea rejects him for his ugliness. Borrowing from Philoxenus, Theocritus has the giant discover that music cures a broken heart. He plays the panpipes and sings: "I am skilled in piping as no other Cyclops here." The pair are mismatched, one of earth and one of water.

  Callimachus took up the idea in his Epigram 47: "How excellent was the charm that Polyphemus discovered for the lover. By Earth, the Cyclops was no fool!" A fragment of a lost idyll by Bion shows the giant swearing undying love. An elegy on Bion's death, once attributed to Moschus, boasts that Bion's art did what the Cyclops could not. It draws Galatea out of the sea to herd his cattle. In Theocritus's Idyll VI, two herdsmen hold a musical contest, and one plays Polyphemus. He claims that Galatea now chases him, since he has learned to ignore her.

  The Latin poets would add a rival to the triangle.

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• 6. Acis and Galatea

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  A love elegy by the Latin poet Propertius, from the 1st century BC, lists music's powers. He says that "Even Galatea, it's true, below wild Etna, wheeled her brine-wet horses, Polyphemus, to your songs." In his telling, song bridges the gap between land and sea.

  Ovid darkened the story in his Metamorphoses. He drew on Theocritus but added a new figure, Acis, who now holds Galatea's heart. The hulking monster of Homer returns, and his clumsy attempt to play the tender shepherd makes Galatea laugh. Still, he boasts of what love has done to him: "I, who scorn Jove and his heaven and his piercing lightning bolt, submit to you alone."

  Galatea and Acis hide behind a rock while Polyphemus sings. He scolds her for not loving him, offers rustic presents, and praises his best feature, his single eye, which he claims is as big as a great shield. Then he spots the lovers and burns with jealousy. Galatea plunges into the ocean. The Cyclops tears a piece off the mountain and crushes Acis. Galatea returns and changes her dead lover into the spirit of the Sicilian river that bears his name.

  Visual art of the 1st century AD allowed happier endings. One mural recovered from Pompeii shows Polyphemus seated on a rock, a cithara beside him, reaching out for a love letter. A winged Cupid rides a dolphin to deliver it from Galatea. Another fresco of the same century shows the two in a naked embrace.

  Their union was said to be fruitful. Some accounts made the Celts, called Galati in Latin, descend from their son Galatos. Appian gave them three children, Celtus, Illyrius and Galas, the ancestors of the Celts, Illyrians and Gauls.

  Lucian of Samosata offers a quieter picture. In one of his dialogues, Doris spitefully congratulates her sister Galatea on a conquest. Galatea defends Polyphemus. She admits she does not love him, but she is pleased that he picked her from all her companions. Doris, it seems, is mostly jealous that her sister has a suitor at all.

  At the turn of the 5th century AD, the Greek epic Dionysiaca by Nonnus pictures Galatea dancing at the wedding of Poseidon and Beroe. She sings the marriage songs, he says, because Polyphemos taught her with a shepherd's syrinx.

  When the Renaissance arrived, it was Ovid's tragic version that poets reached for.

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• 7. Stage and Verse

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  Luis de Góngora y Argote published his Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea in Spain in 1627. Readers admired its landscapes and its sensual account of the love of Acis and Galatea. It was a tribute to a shorter poem of the same name by Luis Carillo y Sotomayor, from 1611. Antoni Lliteres Carrió made a zarzuela of the tale in 1708, lightened by the clowns Momo and Tisbe.

  In France, Tristan L'Hermite squeezed the story into the fourteen lines of a sonnet, "Polyphème en furie," in 1641. The enraged giant hurls the rock that kills Acis and wounds Galatea. Jean-Baptiste Lully set the theme as the opera Acis et Galatée in 1686.

  Italian composers took it up next. Giovanni Bononcini wrote the one-act opera Polifemo in 1703. Handel, working in Italy, composed the cantata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo in 1708 and gave the giant as much weight as the lovers. Polifemo's deep bass solo "Fra l'ombre e gl'orrori" (From horrid shades) sets his character at once.

  After moving to England, Handel returned to the story with a pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea, to an English libretto by John Gay. He first composed it in 1718 and revised it many times. Both Mozart and Mendelssohn later gave it new orchestrations. The focus is the lovers, and when Polyphemus declares his love with "O ruddier than the cherry," the effect is almost comic. Nicola Porpora, for a time Handel's rival in London, wrote his own opera Polifemo in 1735.

  Joseph Haydn made Acide e Galatea his first opera, in Vienna in 1763. Written for an imperial wedding, it ends happily with the transformation of Acis, as the pair swear eternal love. Johann Gottlieb Naumann went comic with Aci e Galatea, subtitled i ciclopi amanti (the amorous cyclops), first performed in Dresden in 1801. He added a companion for Polifemo named Orgonte, along with two more lovers, Dorinda and Lisia.

  British poets returned to the subject in the 19th century. In 1819, Bryan Procter, writing as Barry Cornwall, published The Death of Acis. In it the giant's musicianship lures the lovers out of hiding and so causes the killing. Near the end of the century, Alfred Austin's dramatic poem "Polyphemus" is set after the murder. The giant is tormented by the happy voices of Galatea and Acis singing their love duet.

  Albert Samain's two-act verse drama Polyphème added Lycas, Galatea's younger brother. The giant becomes sympathetic. He spares the lovers when he finds them, blinds himself, and wades into the sea to die. The play was first staged after Samain's death, in 1904, with incidental music by Raymond Bonheur. Jean Cras composed his opera Polyphème on Samain's text in 1914, with few changes. He divided the two acts into four and trimmed the giant's last speech. It was first performed in 1922.

  Two Spanish musical works also carry the giant's name. Reginald Smith Brindle's El Polifemo de Oro, four fragments for guitar from 1956, borrows its title from a Federico García Lorca poem, "The riddle of the guitar." There, six dancing maidens, the strings, are entranced by a golden Polyphemus, the guitar's one-eyed sound-hole. Andres Valero Castells wrote Polifemo i Galatea in 2001 for brass band, inspired by Góngora, and rescored it for orchestra in 2006.

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• 8. Paint and Stone

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  On surviving vases from the 7th century BC, only two scenes from the Odyssey appear. One is the blinding of Polyphemus, and the other is the escape under the sheep. Later pottery shows a far wider range of episodes. A vase showing the hero carried beneath a sheep supplied the design for a Greek postage stamp of 27 drachmas in 1983.

  Roman sculptors went large. The Sperlonga sculptures, probably made for the Emperor Tiberius, show the blinding in life-size figures, including a giant Polyphemus. They may reinterpret an earlier composition. Variations apparently appeared later in palaces built by Claudius and Nero, and at Hadrian's Villa.

  In 1635, the Flemish artist Jacob Jordaens painted Odysseus escaping from the cave. Other European painters preferred the giant hurling boulders at the departing ship. In Guido Reni's painting of 1639-40, an enraged Polyphemus tugs a boulder from the cliff while the men row to their ship far below. Painters often give him two empty eye sockets plus a damaged eye in the middle of his forehead, a convention going back to Greek statuary and painting. Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein's head-and-shoulders portrait of 1802 follows it.

  Arnold Böcklin shows the giant swinging a rock as the men row desperately over a swelling wave. In Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting of 1902, he stands on a cliff after one throw that barely misses. J. M. W. Turner's Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829) depicts the cause of the rage. The ship sails on as the sun breaks through low clouds, and the giant is a faint shape almost lost in the woods and smoke.

  The love story inspired its own tradition. Nicolas Poussin set his 1649 Landscape with Polyphemus in a pastoral setting where the lovers are minor figures in the foreground. Polyphemus merges with a distant mountain top, playing his pipes. In an earlier Poussin of 1630, now in the National Gallery in Dublin, the couple embrace unseen as the giant plays his flute higher up the slope. Giulio Romano painted a fresco in 1528 with Polyphemus holding a lyre, and the lovers are visible through a gap in the rocks. Corneille Van Clève's sculpture of 1681 shows a seated giant holding pipes and a massive club. Pietro Dandini painted another variation.

  Many works show the pair divided by their elements. In paintings titled The Triumph of Galatea, her Nereid sisters carry her through the sea while a small Polyphemus serenades from the land. François Perrier, Giovanni Lanfranco and Jean-Baptiste van Loo painted typical examples. Gustave Moreau made a whole series on the theme. His giant spies on Galatea through a grotto wall or emerges from a cliff to gaze at her asleep. Odilon Redon's The Cyclops of 1913 has the giant towering over the slope where she sleeps.

  In 1866, Auguste Ottin made a fountain in the Luxembourg Garden. A crouching bronze Polyphemus peers down at a white marble Acis and Galatea. Auguste Rodin modelled a series of Polyphemus statues in clay around 1888, later cast in bronze, perhaps inspired by Ottin. A final theme is rage after discovery, painted by Annibale Carracci, Lucas Auger and Carle van Loo. Jean-François de Troy's 18th-century canvas combines the discovery with the aftermath. The giant above the lovers turns to tear up a rock.

  The name has traveled beyond art. Albert Pike's Morals and Dogma, published in 1871, mentions Polyphemus in its "Apprentice" chapter. In Scottish Rite Freemasonry he stands for a civilization that harms itself with blind, misdirected force. The Polyphemus moth is named for the large eyespots on its hind wings. And the burrowing tortoise Gopherus polyphemus carries his name because, like the Cyclops in his cave, it lives in an underground retreat.

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