Of all the adventures of Odysseus on his long voyage home from Troy, none is more famous than his encounter with Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant. Told by Odysseus himself in Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, the episode has everything: a monstrous cannibal, a sealed cave, a desperate plan, a brilliant pun, and a hero whose cleverness saves his men — and whose pride very nearly destroys them. It also sets in motion the rest of the epic, since Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, and the sea-god’s anger will keep Odysseus from home for ten more years.
The Land of the Cyclopes
After escaping the Lotus-Eaters, Odysseus’s twelve ships came to the land of the Cyclopes. Homer describes them as lawless giants who neither plough nor plant, living on what grows wild. They hold no assemblies and have no laws; each lives in a cave in the mountains and rules his own wife and children, caring nothing for the others. They build no ships and so have never crossed the sea to trade.
Just offshore lay a wooded island full of wild goats. Odysseus left eleven ships there and sailed with one crew to the mainland to see what kind of people lived there — “whether they are violent, savage, and unjust, or kind to strangers and god-fearing.”
The Cave
Odysseus chose twelve of his best men and took with him a goatskin of very strong, sweet, dark wine, given to him by Maron, a priest of Apollo whom he had spared at Ismarus. The wine was so potent that it was normally mixed with twenty measures of water.
They found a great cave, high up near the sea, sheltered by laurels and surrounded by a yard of stone. Its owner was out with his flocks. Inside were racks of cheeses, pens of lambs and kids, and pails of whey. Odysseus’s men begged him to take the cheeses and animals and run back to the ship. Odysseus refused; he wanted to see the owner and hoped for a guest-gift. It was, he admits in hindsight, a terrible mistake.
Polyphemus
In the evening the giant returned with his flocks. He threw down a load of firewood with a crash that sent the Greeks scrambling into the corners of the cave. Then he drove in his ewes and she-goats and closed the entrance with a boulder so huge that twenty-two four-wheeled wagons could not have moved it. He milked his animals, set the milk to curdle, and lit a fire — and saw the strangers.
Odysseus appealed to the laws of hospitality, protected by Zeus, the god of strangers and suppliants. Polyphemus laughed. The Cyclopes, he said, care nothing for Zeus; they are far stronger. Then he seized two of Odysseus’s men, dashed their heads against the floor “like puppies,” and ate them, bones and all, washing them down with milk. Then he lay down and slept.
Odysseus’s first thought was to stab the sleeping giant in the liver with his sword. Then he realized that if Polyphemus died, the Greeks would be trapped forever behind the boulder that none of them could move.
The Plan
In the morning Polyphemus ate two more men, drove his flocks out, and replaced the boulder. Odysseus used the day to prepare. In the cave lay a great club of green olive wood that the Cyclops had cut to dry, as long and thick as the mast of a merchant ship. Odysseus cut off a fathom’s length, had his men smooth it, sharpened the end to a point, and hardened it in the fire. Then he hid it under the dung. The men cast lots to choose four to help him drive it home.
That evening, when Polyphemus had eaten two more men, Odysseus offered him a bowl of the dark wine. The Cyclops drank, and demanded more — and asked the stranger’s name, promising him a guest-gift. Odysseus gave him three bowls. Then he answered:
“Cyclops, you ask my famous name. I will tell you… Nobody is my name. Nobody my mother and father call me, and all my companions.”
Polyphemus replied: “Then Nobody I will eat last of all his companions, and the others before him. That will be your gift.” And he fell over in a drunken sleep, vomiting wine and pieces of human flesh.
The Blinding
Odysseus heated the point of the stake in the fire until the green wood was about to catch light. Then he and his four companions drove it into the giant’s single eye. Odysseus, leaning his weight on top, twisted it round as a shipwright twists a drill. Homer’s description is vivid and horrible: the blood boiling around the hot stake, the eyebrows and eyelashes singed, the roots of the eye crackling, like the hiss of an axe-head plunged in cold water to temper it.
Polyphemus bellowed so loudly that the rocks echoed. He tore out the stake and called for the other Cyclopes, who came to the outside of his cave and asked what was wrong. Was someone stealing his flocks? Was someone killing him?
“Nobody is killing me,” Polyphemus roared, “by trickery, not by force!”
“Well,” they answered, “if nobody is hurting you, then it must be a sickness sent by Zeus, and there’s nothing we can do. Pray to your father Poseidon.” And they went away. Odysseus laughed in his heart.
The pun is even better in Greek. The name Odysseus chose, Outis, means “nobody”; but in the Cyclopes’ reply the word for “no one” becomes mē tis, which sounds almost exactly like mētis, “cunning intelligence” — the defining quality of Odysseus himself.
The Escape Under the Sheep
Blinded, Polyphemus groped his way to the entrance, moved the boulder, and sat in the doorway with his arms stretched out, hoping to catch the Greeks if they tried to slip out with the flocks.
Odysseus tied the rams together in threes with willow withies, and bound one man under the middle ram of each group, shielded on both sides. He himself took the largest ram of all, the leader of the flock, and clung to the thick wool under its belly.
At dawn the rams went out to pasture. Polyphemus ran his hands over their backs but did not think to feel beneath them. The great ram came last, weighed down by its burden. Polyphemus stopped it and spoke to it tenderly: why was it lagging behind today, when it was always first to the meadow? Was it grieving for its master’s eye? If only it could speak, it might tell him where Nobody was hiding — and he would dash out the stranger’s brains. It is one of the most unexpectedly moving moments in the poem: the monster, blinded, talking to his favourite animal.
The ram carried Odysseus out, and the Greeks were free.
The Taunt and the Curse
The men drove the flocks down to the ship and rowed out to sea. When they were a shout’s distance from shore, Odysseus could not resist taunting the giant. Polyphemus broke off the top of a mountain and hurled it, and it landed just ahead of the ship, washing them back towards the beach.
His men begged him to be quiet. Odysseus shouted again — and this time gave his real name:
“Cyclops, if anyone asks who blinded you, tell them it was Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes, whose home is in Ithaca.”
It was the most costly boast in the Odyssey. Polyphemus remembered a prophecy that a man named Odysseus would blind him, though he had expected a great and handsome giant, not a little weakling who first made him drunk. He lifted his hands to heaven and prayed to his father Poseidon: let Odysseus never reach home — or if he is fated to reach it, let him come late and in misery, having lost all his companions, on a stranger’s ship, and find troubles in his house.
Poseidon heard. Every part of that curse came true.
Meaning and Interpretation
The episode stages a contrast between civilization and savagery. The Cyclopes have no agriculture, no law, no assemblies, no ships, and no respect for guests — everything that defined a civilized Greek community. Polyphemus’s cannibalism is the ultimate violation of xenia, the sacred bond between host and guest.
But Odysseus is not blameless. He enters the cave out of curiosity and greed; he loses six men as a result; and his final boast, prompted by pride, brings on the curse that dooms the rest of his crew. The hero wins through mētis — cunning — and nearly loses everything through the need to be known. To escape, he had to become Nobody. The moment he insisted on being Odysseus again, his troubles began.
Other Versions
Polyphemus also appears in a very different light in Greek pastoral poetry. Theocritus and Ovid tell of his hopeless love for the sea-nymph Galatea, who preferred the handsome youth Acis. The jealous Cyclops crushed Acis with a boulder, and Galatea turned her lover into a river. Scholars have also noted that Odysseus’s escape from the giant’s cave has parallels in folktales from across Europe and Asia — including the voyages of Sinbad in the Thousand and One Nights, in which a giant roasts and eats Sinbad’s companions and is blinded with red-hot spits.
A popular theory links the Cyclops myth to the discovery of the skulls of dwarf elephants on Mediterranean islands. An elephant skull has a large central nasal opening that could easily be mistaken for a single eye socket.
Last reviewed: September 2026.