BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

The story of Odysseus and his men caught in the cave of the cannibal giant and of their escape clinging to the bellies of sheep is one of the most familiar, and most imitated, of the Odyssey's narratives; it has become an iconic story for western narrative literature. As for antiquity, enough evidence survives to allow us to track the main outlines of a set of interpretations which saw in this story a foundational text of Greek identity, the triumph of intelligence (μῆτις and λογισμός), social convention and respect for the gods, a mixture to which we might be tempted to give the name ‘civilisation’, over an unreasoning and impious reliance on brute force and a rejection of socialised community in favour of radical self-will and individual appetite (θυμός, cf. Odyssey 9.278). Like Achilles' struggle with the impulse to draw his sword on Agamemnon in Iliad 1, Book 9 of the Odyssey can with hindsight be seen to stand behind much Greek, most notably Platonic, psychology, and it is thus not surprising that it became the subject of elaborate allegory; something of the flavour of this material, and something of the fascination of the story of the Cyclops, may be gained from Eustathius' discussion, which sums up a whole tradition of interpretation: