The Many Lives of Polyphemus: How Homer's Cannibal Became an Unlikely Romantic

Natalie Lawrence
Jul 16
4 min read

Updated: Aug 3

Part 1 of my Odyssey Monsters: Afterlives series, tracking their evolutions across art and literature.

Next posts: The Laestrygonians, The Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis

Today, Polyphemus is known only as the gullible cannibal of Homer’s epic: the hulking Cyclops who trapped Odysseus in his cave and devoured his men, before being outwitted by the hero’s inventive use of sheep. One of the defining encounters of the Odyssey, it also makes Polyphemus one of the most memorable monsters of ancient literature.

But Homer’s terrifying giant did not remain a cannibal for long. Later poets took this monster and imagined a life for him beyond violence and shepherding. They transformed him completely: from cannibal to unrequited lover.

Homer’s savage shepherd

When we first meet Polyphemus in Book 9 of the Odyssey, he is a creature who stands somewhere between man and nature. Homer emphasises his isolation. Unlike the Greeks, the Cyclopes have no civic structures: each giant dwells alone in a cave in the island’s rough landscape. (The Cyclopes of Hesiod were smart and productive, but not so the Homeric clan).

Polyphemus is large, powerful and indifferent to the sacred customs of hospitality. Instead of welcoming the strangers, he blocks the cave entrance with a boulder and begins eating Odysseus’ crew with (figurative) relish. Six men down, the horror of the scene lies not only in the violence but in how he chews men up so thoughtlessly. His deep care for his sheep flock is a striking contrast.

Odysseus gets the Cyclops with fine wines, giving the name 'Nobody'. When the giant slumbers, Odysseus blinds him with a sharpened olive stake. Polyphemus cries out in pain but when his neighbors ask who's attacking him, he just screams 'Nobody!' and they go about their days.

This makes it possible for Odysseus and his remaining crew to escape by clinging to the bellies of Polyphemus’ sheep as he lets them out to graze. Humiliated, as he realises how he’s been tricked, the giant tears rocks from the Sicilian coast and hurls them after the departing ship. Odysseus' pride gets the better of him as he sails off, and he shouts his real name across the water. Polyphemus' prayers to his father, Poseidon, condemn Odysseus to the long and bitter voyage that occupies the rest of the epic.

Along Sicily’s eastern coast, towering volcanic sea stacks near Aci Trezza are still known as the Faraglioni dei Ciclopi. Local tradition claims they are the rocks Polyphemus hurled after Odysseus as the Greek ships escaped his cave.

It is difficult to imagine a less romantic figure.

The Blinding of Polyphemus, by Pellegrino Tibaldi, c1550-51 — The Blinding of Polyphemus, by Pellegrino Tibaldi, c.1550-51

A Cyclops falls in love

Yet by the third century BC, the Sicilian poet Theocritus imagined Polyphemus very differently.

His Polyphemus Idyll 11 is still enormous and one-eyed, but he falls hopelessly in love with the sea nymph Galatea. He sits on the shoreline composing songs to soothe his lovesickness. He compares his shaggy appearance to handsome rivals, worries about his attractiveness like an insecure teenager and attempts to woo Galatea with gifts of milk, apples and bear cubs.

The result is unexpectedly touching. The monster becomes almost comic in his vulnerability and naiveté. He remains physically grotesque, but he becomes emotionally recognisable - we get a view into his inner life.

(By Theocritus’ time, stories linking Polyphemus with the sea nymph Galatea were already circulating)

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Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings

Ovid’s tragic giant

Several centuries later, Ovid took Theocritus’ lovesick Cyclops but gave the story a darker ending.

Galatea has no interest in Polyphemus. Instead she loves a handsome shepherd called Acis. Watching the pair together, the jealous Cyclops tears a vast rock from the mountainside and crushes Acis beneath it. True to Homeric form.

Unlike Homer’s anonymous victims, however, Acis is mourned. Galatea transforms his blood into a river, allowing him to live on as a Sicilian water deity. The story shifts once again. Polyphemus is no longer simply a monster or a comic lover, but a tragic rival whose unrequited passion destroys what he cannot possess. In contrast to Homer, Ovid’s story is about love, jealousy and metamorphosis.

Gustave Moreau, Polyphemus adores the sleeping Galatea (c.1880)

The Cyclops’s long afterlife

Later Greek and Roman art increasingly depicted Polyphemus with panpipes rather than human limbs in his hands. He becomes more of an arcadian faun-like figure. Renaissance painters showed him gazing wistfully across the sea towards Galatea. Operas, paintings and poems reinterpreted him, often emphasising his loneliness more than his violence.

Polyphemus’s transformation reminds us that ‘Greek mythology’ is not a fixed monolith. What we are left with today are the distilled, textual versions of a multiplicity of tellings in oral culture, and even these are incredibly mercurial. Monsters themselves mutate and develop along with the needs of the cultures they move through.

In the case of the Cyclops, what does it suggest that the original, brutish version is the one that has persisted over the millennia?