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Analyze the mythological story of odysseus from the lense of Propp’s Morphology of a Folk Tale. Give a description of this morphology and the story of odysseus. Use directly quotes evidence ffrom the text.
Book source:
We have analyzed myths from different perspectives, such as Burkert’s theory, a Freudian- Jungian approach, Propp’s Morphology of a Folk Tale (formalism/structuralism), Myth and Ritual, and even allegorical interpretations. Choose one or two myths among the ones we studied and analyze them through ONE of those “lenses”.
For example, in Burkert’s theory, a myth serves to legitimize social values and norms (such as the practice of xenia). What social norm(s) do those myths legitimize?
Be sure to spell out your reasoning very carefully. The best answers to this question will move from the evidence to your conclusion with careful attention to detail. Avoid generalizations.
Rubric
Your essay should be around 2,000 word long.
Be sure that you make clear what pieces of information (in the case of this class, from the texts we have read and/or from the images we have seen in class) relate to the question you are discussing. Generalizations that are not anchored in specific, concrete evidence do not display your knowledge of the material; they can also run the risk of being contradicted by some of our material.
Be sure that you make clear the reasoning that leads your argument from the evidence to your conclusion. Even very interesting ideas cannot be persuasive if the reader cannot see why they should be valid.
• CHAPTER 22 •
The Return of Odysseus
But I imagine that the story of Odysseus is greater
than what he actually did, through the sweetness of Homer’s verse;
for by his winged song he gives to lies a certain dignity,
and his poetic craft deceives us, leading us astray by myths.
PINDAR, Nemean 7.20–23
The poetic genius Homer inherited a story about how Odysseus, one of the principal fighters at Troy, ran into great trouble trying to get home. After twenty years he returned, only to find his son’s life threatened, his father living like a pauper, and his wife besieged in her own house by lascivious, greedy, and politically ambitious men. Without allies, except experience and high intelligence, Odysseus appeared in disguise among his wife’s suitors and, on a feast day of Apollo, he killed them all in cold blood. Of this wonderful gory story of revenge Homer made a parable of the human journey from life into death and return again to life.
In ancient times the Iliad was compared to tragedy because of its somber themes and deep personal conflict; the Odyssey, by contrast, was compared with comedy because (like the folktales whose patterns and symbols Homer borrows) it has a happy ending in which the family is reunited and the promise of the future is affirmed. The Odyssey is a towering artistic achievement, admired and still imitated by artists today, one of the most influential myths in the Western world.
Odysseus’ Journey from Troy
The Cicones and the Lotus Eaters
In the Odyssey, Odysseus recounts his adventures at a banquet on the island of Phaeacia in the court of King Alcinoüs (al-sin-o-us), where Odysseus came ashore after shipwreck in a violent storm. He has been away from home twenty years: ten at Troy, three lost at sea, and seven on the island of the mysterious nymph Calypso (“concealer”). Odysseus’ first-person narrative of his travels occupies one-sixth of Homer’s 12,000-line poem, the Odyssey.
PERSPECTIVE 22.1 Ulysses
The figure of Odysseus, the Roman Ulysses, has long fascinated the West. Although he takes on many meanings, he is always either glorified as the seeker of truth, the restless clever intelligence penetrating the secrets of the world, or damned as the treacherous deceiver, the exalter of intellect above the demands of the heart. Homer’s Odysseus belongs to the first category, but the anti-Odysseus tradition appears as early as Sophocles’ play Philoctetes (409 BC) and is refined by Euripides, Vergil, and others.
The Romans especially developed the tradition hostile to Odysseus because they claimed Aeneas, a Trojan, as their founder. In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) follows the Roman tradition, for he saw legitimate political power in his own world as descending from the Roman state, said to inherit Trojan power (according to the myth). Dante’s is the first important portrayal of Odysseus in a nonclassical language.
In the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, the first of three parts of the Divine Comedy, Dante stands with his guide, Vergil, and looks down in the pit reserved for deceitful counselors. Dante and Vergil are near Hell’s deepest caverns and beneath them see flames that look like fireflies in the darkness. Vergil explains that one flame, split at the top, is Ulysses, crafty inventor of the Trojan Horse, who through guile sneaked into Troy (with Diomedes) and stole the protecting statue of Athena, the Palladium.
Ulysses is condemned to Hell because of his successful stratagems against the Roman’s Trojan forebears, but Dante also condemns him for the restlessness of his intellect and his search for truth, a sinful exploration that can lead only to destruction. The flame speaks and tells a tale never told in the ancient world: how Odysseus never reached home, but was lost, still searching, in the high seas beyond the Pillars of Heracles (= Strait of Gibraltar). The voice is prophetic, foretelling the age of discovery when restless Europeans, cultural descendants of Greece and Rome and dependent on ancient Greek geographers, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and sailed around Africa to discover new worlds. Although building his portrait of Ulysses on that of the Roman poet Vergil, Dante rediscovered the Greek Odysseus who scorns comfort to explore the unknown.
The pro-Odysseus tradition reappears in “Ulysses” of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the most famous English poet of the Victorian age, who glorifies the very qualities that Dante condemns. The poem is set on Ithaca. Ulysses has grown old, but he is determined to leave home again in pursuit of fresh adventure:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees …
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die …
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
A sympathetic perception also underlies the most celebrated recasting of Odysseus in the twentieth century in James Joyce’s (1882–1941) novel Ulysses (1922). In this long and difficult work (768 pages), really a satire, Ulysses appears as Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, forever the outsider, who makes a modest living selling advertising for a newspaper. The book describes his wanderings on a single day through the streets of Dublin, whose humdrum everyday life replaces the exotic lands of Homer’s story. Telemachus is replaced by Stephen Dedalus, whose name combines that of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and that of Daedalus, the master artist of Athens.
Stephen Dedalus is a world-weary dropout whose mind is preoccupied with the relationship between Hamlet and his father (just as Homer’s Telemachus goes in quest of his father). The princess Nausicaä, whom Homer’s Odysseus compared to Artemis in beauty, is a crippled shop-girl who inspires Leopold Bloom to masturbate in his pants as he watches her on the beach. Penelopê, Leopold’s wife, Molly, is conducting a torrid affair with Blazes Boylan (= the suitors), who in this case has succeeded in seducing the lady of the house. Although Leopold knows about her tryst on that afternoon, he can think of no way to prevent it. Yet Molly in her own way, in her heart, is truly like Penelopê, ever faithful to her beloved “Poldy.”
When Odysseus and his twelve ships leave Troy, they stop at Ismarus in Thrace, land of the Cicones (sik-o-nēz), and sack the city. Against the advice of their commander, they pause to devour the stolen sheep, cattle, and wine. On the next morning the neighboring Cicones attack, killing six men from every ship (each ship seems to have had a crew of fifty).
The remaining Greeks escape by sea but are soon caught in a storm off the southern coast of the Peloponnesus. Violent winds blow them out of the everyday world into the mythical land of the Lotus Eaters. The local inhabitants consume a drug that makes men forgetful of their home and their purpose:
[94] Once any of them had tasted the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus,
95 he lost his desire to return, to boast of his glorious exploits.
All they wished was to stay in the land of the eaters of lotus,
drowsily nibbling the fruit, and forgetting their hopes of return.
Ignoring their tears, I frog-marched them back at once to the vessels,
to lash them under the thwarts in the bilge of the hollow ships.
100 Then I ordered the rest of my crew, shipmates sober and trusty,
to embark in the ships right away, lest, after tasting the lotus
some of them might be tempted to give up all hope of return.
Quickly they hurried aboard and took their place on the benches.
Swinging together they caught at the foaming sea with their oars.
HOMER, Odyssey 9.94–104
Polyphemus
At sea again, the Greeks come to the land of the Cyclopes (“round-eyes”) and the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus (“much-renowned”). This story, one of the most famous in the world, surely had an independent existence before Homer adapted it to the story of Odysseus. From the evidence of art, the story seems to have been excerpted often from the longer poem for separate performance, once it was written down in the eighth century BC:
[105] Forward we sailed, regretful of all we were leaving behind.
In time we came to the land of the arrogant lawless Cyclopes,
who sow no crops with their hands, nor harvest the ripened grain,
but entrust all that to heaven; so all their needs are supplied—
wheat and barley and vines which bear them wine in abundance,
110 fostered by Zeus’s rain, without labor of seedtime or harvest.
They never unite in assembly for common decisions or laws,
but live in echoing caves on the highest peaks of the mountains,
alone, each ruling his wife and children, ignoring all others.
A little outside a harbor along the Cyclopean coastline
115 stretches a wooded island, a breeding place for wild goats,
untroubled by wandering humans or hunters in search of game.
No danger ever concerns them as they wander over the hillsides,
no goat pens cumber the island, no plowland limits their range.
No humans inhabit the region, unplowed and fallow forever,
120unharvested through the ages, a pasture for bleating goats.
For Cyclopes know nothing of ships with red-painted gunwales.
They have no shipwrights to build vessels of well-fitted benches
to sail to the cities of men and return with whatever they lack—
crossing the sea in their vessels in search of something to trade.
125 Traders, indeed, might make of the island a prosperous city,
a source of all that is good with nothing to threaten its safety.
By the coast of the foaming sea lie rich and well-watered meadows
that, planted with grapes, would yield almost perpetual vintage.
Plowmen could easily harvest abundant crops in their season
130 from the island’s soil, so easy to harrow, so deep and so fertile.
The harbor, moreover, is perfect; a ship has no need of an anchor
or hawsers at either end, to hold her fast in her place.
Just beach her and leave her alone for as long a time as you fancy
till the men are ready to sail and following breezes are rising.
135 Abundant fresh water runs from springs at the head of the harbor,
rising deep in a cave whose mouth is surrounded by poplars.
Some god was surely the pilot who guided us into the harbor
through the dark of night, for the dawn had not begun to appear.
Deep fog enveloped the ships, no moon was shining in heaven.
140 Clouds had covered her face. No one saw the loom of the island,
nor did we see the long crests of the breakers rolling ashore
till our vessels had already grounded and run on the sandy beach.
We jumped out into the water, removed the gear from the vessels,
then pulled our ships to safety and clambered up on the seashore
145 where we sank into deepest slumber to wait for the breaking of dawn.
Rose-fingered dawn at last revealed the coming of morning.
Gaping about in surprise, we wandered all over the island
whose nymphs, the daughters of Zeus, the god adorned with the aegis.
roused up herds of wild goats as breakfast for all my comrades.
150 From the ships we took curved bows and deeply socketed lances,
split ourselves into three groups, and then set off to the hunt.
The gods gave us wonderful luck. Nine goats were allotted to each
of the dozen ships of my fleet, and ten to me as commander.
So we spent the whole day till the sun was setting at evening,
155 feasting on endless fresh meat washed down with mellow old wine.
For the wine in our ships as yet was not completely exhausted,
wine that was part of our loot from the holy Ciconian city.
This we had poured in great jars and distributed plenty to each.
All that day we watched the land of the nearby Cyclopes,
160 seeing their smoke and hearing the sound of men and their flocks.
But after the sun had set and darkness came over the heavens,
we finally laid ourselves down to sleep by the edge of the water.
Rose-fingered dawn at last revealed the coming of morning.
I rose to my feet, called the men, and issued them these as orders:
165 “My comrades, stay here a bit while I and the crew of my vessel
go out to spy on the natives, what sort of people they are.
Uncivilized, maybe, and savage, having no vestige of honor,
or possibly kindly to strangers with minds inspired by heaven.”
At this I climbed in my ship and ordered my comrades to follow,
170 to cast off the hawsers, board, and seat themselves at the oars.
Quickly they hurried aboard and took their place on the benches.
Swinging together they caught at the foaming sea with their oars.
When we got to the nearby mainland, we could see the mouth of a cavern
down by the edge of the sea, high-vaulted, shaded by laurels,
175 where sheep and goats liked to sleep. Its front was a sort of corral,
fashioned of rough quarried stones piled up as high as the roof,
braced by long slender firs and trunks of high-foliaged oak trees.
Inside, there slept by himself a man of incredible stature,
a hermit, watching his sheep, avoiding the rest of his fellows,
180 in solitude making up fantasy, dreaming his god-accursed dreams.
His frame was enormous, atrocious, unlike that of bread-eating humans.
Rather, he looked like a craggy spur of a desolate mountain,
standing alone and apart, its trees all gnarled and contorted.
The rest of my loyal crew I told to remain with the vessel
185 and to pull it up on the beach while I myself with a dozen,
the best of the men, set out. With me I carried a goatskin
of wine, black, potent, and sweet, which Maron, son of Euanthes,
priest of Ismarean Apollo,° gave me when we protected
him with his wife and son, out of reverence for Apollo.
190 For Maron lived in a tree-studded meadow, the property of the god.
He had given magnificent gifts—seven talents of workable gold
and a bowl of the purest silver. As crown to this he included
fully a dozen double-eared jars, into which he decanted
a sweet and powerful wine, a drink to delight the immortals.
195 Nobody knew it existed, not even the slaves of the household.
Maron alone, his wife, and his stewardess knew of the secret.
Whenever he drank of the crimson wine with a heart sweet as honey,
he filled one cup and then added full twenty measures of water.°
At once the bowl breathed out a bouquet of heavenly fragrance,
200 a scent which I knew full well no man would dream of resisting.
With this I filled up a wineskin and hid it all in a knapsack,
for deep in my heart I suspected I soon would encounter a being
armed with invincible strength, but savage, barbaric, and lawless.
We quickly got to the cave, but did not find its owner within it,
205for he was herding fat sheep and moving from pasture to pasture.
Into the cave we wandered and looked around in amazement:
baskets loaded with cheeses, pens crowded with kids and with lambs,
milling about, group by group, the oldest, middling, and weanlings;
containers—pans, bowls, and buckets—carefully fashioned for milking.
210 Uneasily then my companions began to urge me, suggesting
that we borrow a few of the cheeses and maybe a kid or a lamb,
driving them out from the sheepfolds. Then, hurrying back to the ship
we should depart at once and set off on the briny dark waters.
But I refused their advice (later on, how I wished I had listened!),
215 for I wanted to see the owner and see what gifts he might offer.°
(In fact, when he did appear, he was not at all nice to my comrades.)
So we sat inside by a fire and nibbled bits of the cheeses,
offering some to the gods, while we waited for him to come back.
At last he returned from the pasture with a heavy load of dry wood
220 to give him light for his supper. He threw this down on the floor
inside the cave with a crash that frightened us off to a corner
while he himself went out, to return with the ewes and the nannies,
leaving the rams and the billies corralled outside in the forecourt.
He then picked up a great rock and set it to serve as a barrier.
225 Twenty-two four-wheeled wagons could not shift it up from its threshold,
yet he easily moved this towering rock to block up the doorway.
Then down he sat to milk the ewes and the bleating nannies,
setting their young under each, with everything neat and in order.
Half the white milk he collected to curdle in wickerwork baskets;
230 the rest he poured into bowls, to take and drink for his supper.
He busied himself at his task, but when at last he was finished
he blew up his fire, looked around, saw us, and thus he addressed us:
“Gentlemen, who might you be? Whence did you voyage the waters?
Are you come hither to trade, or are you wandering at random
235 like pirates over the sea, cruising now this way, now that,
forever risking your lives and bringing destruction to others?”
So he inquired and we felt our poor hearts shatter within us,
hearing his thundering voice and seeing the mass of his body.
Yet I managed to answer his question in these diplomatic words:
240 “We are Achaeans, returning home from our warfare at Troy.
Winds of all sorts have scattered and driven us over the surges,
some in the way they would go, but us by a far different journey.
No doubt the inscrutable mind of Zeus has determined our fortune.
Know you that we are the people of Atreus’ son, Agamemnon,
245 whose fame is the greatest of all men living under the heaven
for the mighty city he sacked, the many peoples he conquered.
For our part, now we have met you, we beg you for only one thing:
Grant us a kindly reception with a trifle to bid us good-bye,
the usual gift to a stranger, or show due respect to the gods.
250 Suppliants we kneel before you, whom Zeus, defender of strangers,
defends as fully as those to whom honor is owed to as guests.”
From deep in his evil heart the Cyclops gave me his answer:
“Stranger, you really are stupid, or else live a long way off,
if you warn me to dread the gods or fear that they may be offended.
255 We Cyclopes pay no attention to Zeus or the other immortals
because we are stronger by far. And if a whim should possess me,
my fear of the anger of Zeus would not save you or your friends.
But tell me, where did you moor your stout and well-founded ship,
close by, or off at a distance? I really would like to know.”
260 His clumsy attempt to trap me did not deceive my astuteness.
I innocently gave him an answer in lying treacherous words:
“Poseidon, Shaker of Earth, has smashed my ship on a reef
as a rising wind drove her close to a point we wanted to weather.
Only these men and I survived her utter destruction.”
265 Even this tale did not soften the flinty heart of the Cyclops.
Springing erect, he grabbed with his hands, caught two of my sailors,
and smashed them down on the rock as you kill a superfluous puppy.
Their brains burst out from their skulls and ran all over the floor.
He twisted one limb from another (his way of preparing his supper),
270 and, crunching them down like a wildcat, left never a morsel uneaten,
not entrails or muscle, not even the bones and their succulent marrow.
What could we do but rage as we lifted our hands to the heavens
while watching this horrible crime? Despair crushed all other emotion.
When the Cyclops finally ended stuffing his monstrous great belly
275 with swallows of human flesh, washed down with milk by the bucket,
he stretched himself out in his cave, in the very midst of the sheep.
For a moment I planned to approach, to draw the sword by my side,
to feel for the lethal spot where the diaphragm covers the liver
and stab him under the chest. But second thought gave me pause:
280 We too would die in the cave and suffer a horrible ending,
for I saw no way human hands could budge his rock from the doorway.
So all night long we lay groaning and waiting for dawn to appear.
Rose-fingered dawn at last revealed the coming of morning.
The Cyclops rekindled the fire and milked his magnificent sheep
285 in smooth and efficient fashion, then set each lamb to its mother.
Next, this duty completed, he grabbed two more of my comrades
to gobble them up for his breakfast. Then he easily lifted the stone,
drove his fat sheep outdoors, and put back the boulder behind them,
just as one does when replacing the lid on a quiver of arrows,
290and with many a merry whistle drove off his flock to the mountains.
There I was, left to brood and to fashion a terrible vengeance,
hoping Athena would grant my prayers and an opportune moment.
This plan suggested itself to my heart as by far most effective:
The Cyclops had cut a bludgeon of olive, still pliant and green,
295 and left it to dry by the pens. To us it looked fully as heavy
as the mast of a twenty-oared ship, black-sided, broad in the beam,
plodding its way through the surge, heavily loaded with cargo;
such was its length to our eyes, such was its cumbersome thickness.
From this I chopped off a piece, a length of fully a fathom,
300 and handed it on to my comrades to smooth it and taper it down.
They made the shaft of the weapon all smooth and easy to handle
while I first pointed the tip, then hardened it well in the fire.
This done, I carefully hid it by burying it under a dungheap,
plenty of which, of course, was everywhere piled in the cavern.
305 Lastly, I told the men to draw lots to decide who should join me
in the perilous job of lifting and twisting the ponderous timber
around in the Cyclops’ eyeball when he drifted off to sweet dreams.
Four volunteers they chose, and I added myself to the number.
At evening he reappeared, his wooly sheep going before him.
310 He drove the fat creatures onward into the depths of the cavern,
this time not leaving a one outside in the spacious forecourt.
Perhaps some deity moved him, or perhaps he suspected the truth.
Once more he lifted the boulder and set it over the doorway,
then sat him down to his milking of bleating nannies and ewes
315 in smooth and efficient fashion, then set each lamb to its mother.
Next, this duty completed, he seized two more of my comrades
and devoured them for his supper. At last I spoke to the Cyclops,
standing beside him and holding a large bowl of strong black wine:
“Cyclops, drink up,” said I, “now your cannibal orgy is over,
320 so you may learn what sort of drink we carried as cargo.
See, I have brought you a drop. I hope you will show me your mercy
and send me back to my home, giving up your boorish behavior
that I really can stand no more. How can you dream for a minute
that anyone ever will come, from any nation of mortals,
325 if they hear the way you have acted and the nasty way you behave?”
At that he reached for the bowl and drained it all at a gulp.
The sweet wine delighted his heart, and thus he addressed me again:
“Give me another big drink. But tell me, what is your name?
I shall certainly give you a present, one you will surely enjoy.
330 Oh yes, our land, rich in grapes, yields us Cyclopes a vintage
good in its way, and fostered by showers sent us by Zeus.
But that with which you have plied me is truly a fountain of nectar!”
So he exclaimed, and I poured him a sparkling bumper of wine.
Three times I offered him more; three times he drank in his folly.
335 At last, when the fumes had addled the brain and wits of the Cyclops,
I spoke to him once again with words deceitful of purpose:
“Cyclops, a moment ago you asked me to tell you my name.
I shall tell you, if you in return give me the present you promised.
‘Nobody’ is my name, for my dear mother and father
340 gave me this name at my birth, and since then all my companions.”
These were my words, and this the reply of his arrogant heart:
“ ‘Nobody,’ then, will be last, after all his friends, to be eaten;
before him, the rest will go down. That will be my farewell gift!”°
Collapsing, he sprawled on his back, his head drooping off to one side,
345 and slumber, who conquers all mortals, received him into its charge.
The wine and the half-chewed flesh of humans spewed from his gullet,
vomited up by the drunkard. Then I thrust the stake in the embers
and, while it heated, inspired the hearts of all my companions,
hoping that no one would fail me or flinch in a spasm of terror.
350 Green though it was, the olive-wood stake was about to catch fire
and shone with a red-hot glare. Approaching, I lifted it out.
The others stood by me to help, and some god fired their courage.
They picked up the olive-wood log, red-hot and sharp at the tip,
and swung it into his eye. Against it I threw my whole weight
355 and spun it around, like a shipwright drilling a hole in a timber:
He guides the drill, while his helpers, standing on either side,
saw the thong back and forth as the drill° sinks deeper and deeper.
So I and my men rotated the stake in the eye of the Cyclops. [Figure 22.1]
FIGURE 22.1. The blinding of Polyphemus, on a large Attic jug from Eleusis, c. 670 BC (the jar was used to bury a child). Odysseus and two companions, lifting the fire-hardened stake on their shoulders, blind Polyphemus. In this early mythic representation, the artist has experimented by painting Odysseus white, to distinguish him from the other figures; white usually meant that the figure was female. Note the cup in Polyphemus’ hand, referring to the detail that Odysseus first got him drunk. (Archaeological Museum, Eleusis)
Hissing, his blood spurted out, and the heat singed eyelid and brow.
360 The eyeball, scorched to its roots, crackled and boiled in the fire.
As when a blacksmith is quenching a big bronze° adze or an ax-head,
he plunges it into cold water which makes it sizzle and scream,
but gives the temper required, the strength and toughness of iron—
just so his eyeball squealed as the stake of olive-wood entered
365He let out a horrible cry, which the rocky cavern reechoed,
scaring us back in terror. He plucked at the blood-smeared stake,
wrenched it out from his eye, and in torment hurled it away.
He shouted to other Cyclopes, who lived in the nearby caves
dotted about the wind-blown hillsides, to come to his rescue.
370 Hearing his call, they came at a run from every direction,
and standing before his cave, they asked him what was the matter:
“What troubles you so, Polyphemus, making you call us to help
and rousing us from our slumber, so late in the god-given night?
Perhaps some rascally mortal is trying to rustle your sheep,
375 or is somebody bent on your murder by treachery or brute force?”
The mighty Polyphemus replied from the mouth of his cave:
“Nobody wants to kill me by treachery, not by brute force!”
To this the others replied in words aimed right at the mark:
“If nobody’s using force on a man alone and defenseless,
380 you must have an inescapable sickness, sent by great Zeus.
The best thing for you to do is to pray to your father Poseidon.”
With this retort they departed. I laughed in my inmost heart,
gloating over my shrewdness and seeing them tricked by my name.
The Cyclops groaned in his pain and suffered spasms of torture.
385 Groping about with his hands, he lifted the rock from the doorway,
meanwhile feeling around as he sat there at the entrance,
expecting to catch whoever might try to get out with the sheep,
and even hoping that I might be foolish enough to attempt it.
But I was pondering deeply, to make things turn out for the best,
390 and to find some way to avoid disaster for me and my comrades.
In this matter of life and death, in the face of imminent peril,
this was the method that seemed the best of all possible courses:
The cave held plenty of well-fed rams with thick shaggy fleeces
(big ones, handsome, all covered with heavy dark-colored wool),
395 which I quietly tied in threes with pliant shoots of the willow
where the monster Cyclops slept, planning his criminal horrors.
The rams in the middle each carried a man. The two on the outside
trotted along beside them and thus protected my comrades.
So three rams carried each man, but I myself was left over,
400 as also the noblest ram of the flock enclosed in the sheepfold.
Approaching the beast from behind and stretching under its belly,
I lay there, my hands holding tight to the animal’s glorious wool.
So we lay in discomfort and awaited the light of the dawning.
Rose-fingered dawn at last revealed the coming of morning.
405 The Cyclops drove all the males of the flock away to the pasture,
but the unmilked females remained, with udders swollen to bursting,
bleating in pain, in the cave. Tormented by horrible anguish,
their owner felt the back of each ram as it went out to pasture—
dumbo! he never suspected my men were lashed under their bellies.
410 Last of all the bellwether approached and was nearing the doorway,
slowed by the weight of his wool and of me, a man of resources.
Gently caressing its back, the mighty Polyphemus addressed it:
“My good old ram, how is it that you are last of my flock
to hurry out of the cavern? The others have never outstripped you
415 as you proudly galloped along, the first to taste of the grasses,
to get to the stream, and to hurry home to the fold in the evening.
But today you are last of all. Is it grief for your master’s eye,
which Nobody blinded, the scoundrel, he and his evil companions,
after getting me drunk? But I tell you, he hasn’t yet gotten away
420 from the death he deserves. How I wish that you could stand here beside me
and tell me in human speech how he managed to duck from my power!
I’d smash him down on the floor, his brains would spatter all over
in every part of the cave! And that would lighten the burden
of all the sorrow I feel, which that no-good Nobody caused me.”
425 With this he dismissed the ram to go free from the door and away.
As soon as the ram and I were far enough from the doorway,
I freed my hands from the wool and undid the bonds of my comrades.
Turning the fat and shambling sheep away from their pasture,
we drove them back to the ship and were greeted with great relief—
430 those of us who survived. For the rest they began to lament,
but sorrow I could not allo
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