Cyclops

Different kinds of deception come together in the final scenes of Euripides’s Cyclops. Odysseus, as befits his canonical characterization as a mastermind, puts his plot to blind Polyphemus into motion. He keeps giving the Cyclops wine to make his more and more drunk, and when he falls into a deep sleep he rounds up his men and the Satyrs to drive the sharpened stake into his eye. This is a calculated, goal-oriented deception—the kind of deception the wily Odysseus traditionally practices (indeed, the story itself is taken directly from Homer’s Odyssey). In contrast, the self-serving Silenus practices a very different kind of deception, trying to sneak a taste of the wine while pretending to serve the Cyclops. Silenus is focused only on immediate gratification. His deception is not productive and deflates further the already somewhat less than epic actions of Odysseus.

What’s more, Silenus’s attempts to deceive the Cyclops by stealing from him are directly opposed to Odysseus’s goal of inebriating the Cyclops. Silenus, through his own weakness, once again gets in Odysseus’s way. The play suggests that Silenus’s comeuppance—becoming the sexual victim of Polyphemus—is just deserts for his actions. Polyphemus’s hallucination that Silenus is cupbearer Ganymede is the play’s second joke about sexual violence—a type of humor that might read as disturbing to modern audiences but is in keeping with jokes of Euripides’s time. In a way, this false identification of Silenus with Ganymede is yet one more ridiculing mirror of the Odyssey and Iliad. In those Homeric epics, Odysseus often takes on alternate identities: disguising himself to infiltrate Troy, nicknaming himself “Nobody” to fool Polyphemus, and dressing as a beggar to overcome the suitors besieging Penelope. Here, Silenus is disguised against his own will to become a monster’s sexual plaything.

The characters’ different relationships with the gods also come to a head as the play draws towards its conclusion. Polyphemus continues to scoff at the power of the gods: As much as he enjoys Dionysus’s beverage of wine, he cannot bring himself to regard the god as anything more than “very tasty belching” (523). Nor does his character become much more gracious: As in the Odyssey, the only reward he grants Odysseus for his gift is the promise to eat him last. Silenus and the satyrs, on the other hand, continue to pine for their master Dionysus, whom they long to worship once again. There is a sense of familiarity between the satyrs and the god, and also a genuine desire to serve. Odysseus’s view of the gods falls somewhere in between Polyphemus’s disregard and the satyrs’ devotion. Odysseus certainly does not deny the gods, but his prayers to them are almost threatening: On more than one occasion, Odysseus suggests that his belief in the gods is contingent on them providing him with the help he asks for. When he invokes Hephaestus for help in blinding the Cyclops, for example, Odysseus says that if the god does not help him, “we will make a goddess of Chance, / And count her higher than all the other gods!” (606-7). Odysseus’s prayer to Athena and Zeus in the first episode ended very similarly—an example of hubris that is in line with both his character and the traditional take on his story, as after blinding Poseidon’s son Polyphemus, Odysseus must traverse Poseidon’s incredibly hostile domain for 10 years.

The end of the play—with the Cyclops blinded and Odysseus and the Satyrs running free—is chaotic and even ambivalent. Odysseus’s triumph over the Cyclops represents, in a sense, the triumph of the gods and civilization over savagery. But Odysseus’s relationship to the gods and civilization is not smooth (with Odysseus seemingly trying to “bully” the gods into submission). Nor have any of the characters grown or learned from their mistakes: The Cyclops views himself as a god until the very end; the satyrs abandon Odysseus at the critical moment out of cowardice, much as Silenus betrayed Odysseus in the first episode; and Odysseus blusters recklessly against the Cyclops as he and his men make their escape, his heroic arrogance hardly dampened by his experience.