The Cyclops

Odysseus speaks. He tells how, after leaving Troy, his ships first raided the Cicones — a brief, costly success that ended with his men drunk on the beach as a relief force arrived. Then they drifted to the land of the Lotus Eaters, where his men, eating the lotus, lost all desire to go home and had to be dragged back to the ships in tears. Then the wind blew them to the land of the Cyclopes: shepherd-giants living without laws, without farming, without any of the marks of civilization Odysseus would recognize.

He and twelve of his men explore a coastal cave belonging to one named Polyphemus. The giant returns, blocks the cave with an enormous stone, and eats two of the men for dinner. Trapped, Odysseus thinks. He cannot kill the giant — they would never move the stone. He waits. He offers the giant strong wine, which Polyphemus drinks until he is drunk. The giant asks his name. Outis, Odysseus says: Nobody. When the giant is asleep he and his men sharpen the trunk of an olive tree to a point, heat it in the fire, and drive it into the giant's single eye. The other Cyclopes, hearing “Nobody is killing me!”, go back to bed.

In the morning the giant rolls the stone aside to let his sheep out to graze, and Odysseus and his men escape clinging to the undersides of the rams. Out at sea, safe, Odysseus cannot help himself. He shouts back at the blinded giant: it was Odysseus, son of Laertes, of Ithaca, who blinded you. Polyphemus prays to his father Poseidon: let this man never come home — or if he must, late, alone, on a borrowed ship, and let him find trouble in his house. The prayer is granted. Almost everything that happens to Odysseus from this point onward traces back to it.