Kyklops

A **kyklops** or **cyclops** (Ancient Greek: Κύκλωψ, *Kyklōps*; plural Κύκλωπες, *Kyklōpes*), is a member of a pastoral species of giants 10–20 feet tall, each with a single eye in the center of his forehead.

Hesiod described three one-eyed kyklopes (or urcyclopses) who served as builders, blacksmiths, and craftsmen: Brontes, Steropes and Arges, the sons of Ouranos and Gaia, the brothers of the Titans. Homer described another group of mortal herdsmen or shepherd kyklopes, the sons of Poseidon. Other accounts were written by the playwright Euripides, poet Theocritus and Roman epic poet Virgil. In Hesiod's *Theogony*, Zeus releases three kyklopes from the dark pit of Tartaros. They provide Zeus's thunderbolt, Hades' helmet of invisibility, and Poseidon's trident—the then gods use these weapons to defeat the Titans.

In an episode of Homer's *Odyssey*, the hero Odysseus encounters the kyklops Polyphemos, the son of Poseidon and Thoösa, who lives with his fellow kyklopes in a distant country. The connection between the two groups has been debated in antiquity and by modern scholars. It is often assumed that Polyphemos lives, along with the other kyklopes, on an island; that is a possibility, but all that is known from Homer’s *Odyssey* is that Polyphemos resided in a “land” somewhere farther on from the Lotos Eaters, in a place that is not close or distant from an uninhabited, wooded and unexploited island, where Odysseus arrives. The map location that can be drawn from this episode and the surrounding episodes in the *Odyssey* is variously described and discussed divergently by scholars.

Homer does not specifically state that the kyklops, Polyphemos, has only one eye; some scholars suggest this is implied in the passage that describes Odysseus asking his men to cast lots to select a group that will join with him “to lift the stake and grind it into his eye when sweet sleep should come upon him.” However others suggest that Homer’s Polyphemos may have had two eyes. It is pointed out that in the *Odyssey* when the actual blinding occurs there is a reference to plural brows and lids. Also Homer describes in some detail the entire race of kyklopes, critiquing their agricultural techniques, in what may be literature’s first anthropological study, and never mentions their monocularity. It is also noted that the first artistic or graphic depiction of the blinding episode appears on an amphora that was created by the Polyphemos Painter c. 680-650 B.C., and the artist shows the blinding stake has two prongs, as though two eyes are being targeted. Yet the singular spike put in his eyes is described as like a drill being driven by a shipwright. The pun via the folk etymology, taking *kyklops* to mean 'circle- or wheel-eyed', would be lost if he had two eyes. Also one drilling and removal would not render him completely blind.

In the *Theogony* by Hesiod, the kyklopes – Brontes ("thunderer"), Steropes ("lightning") and the "bright" Arges (Greek: Βρόντης, Στερόπης and Ἄργης) – were the primordial sons of Ouranos (Sky) and Gaia (Earth) and brothers of the Hekatonkheires and the Titans. As such, they were blood-related to the Titan and Olympian gods and goddesses.[16] They were giants with a single eye in the middle of their forehead and a foul disposition. According to Hesiod, they were strong and stubborn. Collectively they eventually became synonyms for brute strength and power, and their name was invoked in connection with massive masonry or blacksmithery. They were often pictured at their forge.

Ouranos, fearing their strength, locked them in Tartaros. Kronos, another son of Ouranos and Gaia, later freed the kyklopes, along with the Hecatoncheires, after he had overthrown Ouranos. Kronos then placed them back in Tartaros, where they remained, guarded by the female monster Kampe, until freed by Zeus. They fashioned thunderbolts for Zeus to use as weapons, and helped him overthrow Kronos and the other Titans. The lightning bolts, which became Zeus's main weapons, were forged by all three kyklopes, in that Arges added brightness, Brontes added thunder, and Steropes added lightning.

These kyklopes also created Poseidon's trident, Artemis' bow and arrows of moonlight, Apollo's bow and arrows of sun rays, and Hades' helmet of darkness that was given to Perseus on his quest to kill Medusa.

According to a hymn of Callimachos, they were Hephaestus' helpers at the forge. The kyklopes were said to have built the "cyclopean" fortifications at Tiryns and Mycenae in the Peloponnese. The noises proceeding from the heart of volcanoes were attributed to their operations.

It is upon Homer's account that Euripides and Virgil based their accounts of the mythical creatures. Euripides in his satyr-drama, *Kyklops*, appears at times to follow closely the story found in Homer, and at other times contributes variations. In Euripides play there is no mention of the unexploited island, and Euripides keeps the action of the play in one location — the place where the kyklopes live, and where Odysseus’ ship landed. Euripides also makes a significant variation from Homer to the setting: he imagines the location to be Mount Etna “where the one-eyed sons of the sea god, the man-slaying kyklopes, live in their desolate caves.” Another source for the story of Polyphemus is *Idyll XI. The Kyklops* by Theocritus (circa 270 BC), in which the kyklopes’ home is, following Euripides, near Mount Etna in Sicily. Since Euripides and Theocritus the Sicilian location has become attached to the kyklops story.

Euripides' only extant comedy is his play *Kyklops*, which takes place on the island of Sicily near the volcano Mount Etna. Written in 408 B.C., it is the only complete satyr play that has survived. It is based on a story that occurs in book nine of Homer's *Odyssey*. The kyklops is portrayed on stage as a cave-dwelling, violent, cannibalistic, oafish character; similar to Homer’s kyklops, though it differs from the kyklops of Hesiod. Euripides’ version may also be influenced by the comic handling of the kyklops found in Cratinus’s play *Odysseuses*, which is one of many plays of ancient Greece that are known to have lampooned Homer’s kyklops story.[18][19]

According to Euripides' play *Alcestis*, Apollo killed the cyclopes, in retaliation for Asclepius' murder at the hands of Zeus. For this crime, Apollo was then forced into the servitude of Admetus for one year. Other stories after Euripides tell that Zeus later revived Asclepius and the cyclopes. This was after the year of Apollo's servitude had passed. Zeus pardoned the cyclopes and Asclepius from the underworld, despite them being dead, even though Hades is lord of the dead and they are his prisoners. Hades as well does not ever allow any of his souls to leave the Underworld. Zeus could not bear the loss of the cyclopes, for they were the biggest reason the Olympians assumed power. Also, Zeus resurrected Asclepius at the request of Apollo so that their feud would end.

Some versions of this myth have it that after Apollo killed the cyclopes, their ghosts dwelt in the caverns of the volcano Aetna.

Strabo describes another group of seven Lycian kyklopes, also known as "bellyhands" because they earned from their handicraft. They had built the walls of Tirynsand perhaps the caverns and the labyrinths near Nauplia, which are called cyclopean.

Virgil, the Roman epic poet, wrote, in book three of *The Aeneid*, of how Aeneas and his crew landed on the island of the kyklops after escaping from Troy at the end of the Trojan War. Aeneas and his crew land on the island, when they are approached by a desperate Greek man from Ithaca, Achaemenides, who was stranded on the island a few years previously with Odysseus' expedition (as depicted in *The Odyssey*).

Virgil's account acts as a sequel to Homer's, with the fate of Polyphemos as a blind kyklops after the escape of Odysseus and his crew where some cases have Polyphemos regaining his eyesight.

Dionysus emabrked on a military campaign to India when Rhea, the mother of Zeus, asked a large group of rustic gods and spirits to join Dionysus' army. The kyklopes played a major part. King Deriades was the leader of the nation of India and the kyklopes were said to crush most of his troops. It is explained in *Nonnus Dionysiaca* that the kyklopes killed many men in the war, which is also the only story that tells how they fight.

It is estimated that Homer’s *Odyssey* was composed sometime in the 50-year period from 725 to 675 BC., and that it shows the influence of earlier oral poetic traditions of different peoples. There are striking parallels between Homer's story and the Caucasian stories of Urzmaeg, where the hero outwits a one-eyed giant, and blinds him with a torch. It is thought that the Caucasian myths probably came to the Greeks through the epic Anatolian song tradition.

The Caucasus region near the Black Sea is rich in a folk literature that contains stories seen as variations of the myths of the ancient Greeks, including the Cyclops stories. In Caucasus these tales have been handed down as songs and narrative poems by a strong oral tradition — which is also the tradition of Homer. One reason the oral tradition is strong is that for most of the languages spoken in this mountainous region there was no written alphabet until relatively recently. The stories are not well known to the English speaking world. They began to be written down and collected in the 1890s, as the Nart saga and the Uryzmaeg stories.[29][30]

In the cyclops stories of the Caucasus, the cyclops is almost always a shepherd, and he is also variously presented as a one-eyed, rock-throwing, cannibalistic giant, who says his name is “nobody”, who lives in a cave, whose door is blocked by a large stone, who is a threat to the hero of the story, who is blinded by a hot stake, and whose flock of sheep is stolen by the hero and his men. These motifs are also found in the cyclops stories of Homer, Euripides, and Hesiod.[31][32][33]

One example in a story from Georgia, describes two brothers trapped in the cave of "One-eye". They take the wooden spit from One-eye’s fire, heat it up, stab it into his eye, and escape.

## Etymology

The word *kyklops* literally means "round-eyed" or "circle-eyed". The word superficially decomposes as κύκλος (kúklos, “wheel, circle”) + ὤψ (ṓps, “eye”). This is thought to be a folk etymology, with the true etymology in Proto-Indo-European *\*pḱu-klōps* (“cattle thief”) becoming obscured after the loss of the word *\*péḱu*. Cattle thieves are pervasive in Indo-European mythology; before the folk etymology, the kyklops may have been a cattle thief of no unusual facial disposition.

## Meta

Walter Burkert among others suggests that the archaic groups or societies of lesser gods mirror real cult associations: "It may be surmised that smith guilds lie behind Cabeiri, Idaian Dactyloi, Telchines, and Cyclopes." Given their penchant for blacksmithing, many scholars believe the legend of the kyklopes' single eye arose from an actual practice of blacksmiths wearing an eyepatch over one eye to prevent flying sparks from blinding them in both eyes. The cyclopes in the *Odyssey* are explicitly seen black smithing nor are they described as having any metal object, so they may be of a different type from those in the *Theogony*. It is possible that independent legends associated with Polyphemos did not make him a kyklops before Homer's *Odyssey*; Polyphemos may have been just a cattle or sheep thief.

Another possible origin for the cyclops legend, advanced by the paleontologist Othenio Abel in 1914,[22] is the prehistoric dwarf elephantskulls – about twice the size of a human skull – that may have been found by the Greeks on Cyprus, Crete, Malta and Sicily. Abel suggested that the large, central nasal cavity (for the trunk) in the skull might have been interpreted as a large single eye-socket.[23] Given the inexperience of the locals with living elephants, they were unlikely to recognize the skull for what it actually was.

After the "Dark Age", when Hellenes looked with awe at the vast dressed blocks, known as Cyclopean structures, which had been used in Mycenaean masonry (at sites such as Mycenae and Tiryns or on Cyprus), they concluded that only the cyclopes had the combination of skill and strength to build in such a monumental manner.