Civilised Cannibals: The Laestrygonians

Natalie Lawrence
Jul 20
3 min read

Updated: Aug 3

Part 2 of my Odyssey Monsters: Afterlives series, tracking their evolutions across art and literature.

Previous post: Polyphemus | Next posts: The Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis

Illustration by John Flaxman for the Odyssey, 1810

Unlike other Odyssey monsters, the Laestrygonians remain unchanged and obscure. While Scylla, Polyphemus, and the Sirens have evolved in art and literature, the Laestrygonians have not. They are often overlooked in visual culture and textual tradition.

The Land of the Laestrygonians

The land of Lamos, where the Laestrygonians dwell, is peculiar: the sun rises almost as soon as it sets. When Odysseus's fleet reaches the natural harbour bordered by steep cliffs in Book 10 of the Odyssey, he sends out three scouts to explore.

These scouts encounter a giantess at a well, who takes them to the town of Telepylus. Everything seems reassuring at first. Unlike the feral lifestyles of the Cyclopes, they have found what appears to be a settled community. However, this community does not adhere to expected mores and, most importantly, a normal diet.

The scouts are brought before King Antiphates. He immediately seizes one of them and devours him on the spot. Chaos ensues as giants begin hurling rocks into the trapped fleet. Eleven of Odysseus’s twelve ships are smashed to pieces. Their crews are speared “like fish” before being carried away to become the Laestrygonians’ dinner.

Only Odysseus escapes. He had left his own ship moored outside the harbour as punishment for the scouts getting the fleet into this mess. This loss is the greatest he suffers during his entire journey home.

The Laestrygonians are arguably more unsettling than the Cyclopes. Polyphemus’s violence makes him a beastly figure. In contrast, the Laestrygonians represent a civilization. They have a town, a social structure, and a royal family. Cannibalism is not the act of one monstrous individual; it is the custom of an entire society.

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Fresco from Rome, c. 125 BC, from the "House of via Graziosa"

Unchanged for Millennia

Unlike other monsters in the Odyssey, the Laestrygonians received little attention from later writers. Virgil bypasses them entirely in the Aeneid. They are only fleetingly referred to by other writers, such as Hesiod (8-7th C BCE), Ovid (1st C BCE- 1st C AD), and Pliny the Elder (1st C AD).

As a result, these strange giants have never been substantially reinvented. They lack colourful origin myths or modern cultural icons. For nearly three thousand years, the Laestrygonians have remained as Homer left them: vast cannibals at the edge of the map. They are less compelling than individual monsters like Scylla or Polyphemus, who can be humanised and fleshed out as characters.

Adventures of Laestrygones, fresco from the Esquiline Hill, Rome

The Legacy of the Laestrygonians

The Laestrygonians did, however, contribute to a tradition of monstrous races. Medieval scholars inherited the classical fascination with the kinds of humans that might exist in distant regions. The Laestrygonians stood alongside the Cynocephali, Blemmyae, and other exotic peoples believed to inhabit the world's distant margins. These figures were not merely monsters to be slain; they represented imagined cultures whose bizarre bodies and customs defined them as the antithesis of civilised humanity, and there by helped to define what humanity was.

In this sense, Homer’s giant cannibals helped shape a tradition that populated medieval maps and manuscripts with strange races lurking at the edges of the known world. Their appearance as quasi-sci-fi beings in Nolan's 2026 The Odyssey is almost an extension of this, as if they are metallic aliens from another world.

*Ancient geographers never agreed on the location of the Laestrygonians. Some interpreted Homer’s land of near-continuous daylight as a far northern landscape beyond the Black Sea, while others placed them in Sicily or southern Italy.