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English words with a mythical past, unpacked one at a time

Chapter II · Odyssey, Book 9

Cyclops, Cyclopean and a Moth Called Polyphemus

A round eye, a wall of boulders, a pun that saves a ship, and a moth with eyes on its wings that flies on summer nights from Ontario to Nova Scotia.

4 min readFour words

A single round eye-like ornament printed in slate blue, framed by stacked wooden blocks, with a rust-red moth ornament showing round eyespots
Plate II. One eye in the middle; two more on the wings of a moth.

Start with the word itself, because it tells you exactly what to expect. Kyklōps is built from kyklos, a circle or wheel — the root of English cycle — and ōps, an eye or face. A cyclops is a “round-eye.” The Greeks named the creature by its most alarming feature, and the name has stuck for close to three thousand years.

Two kinds of Cyclopes

The ancient sources describe two quite different families under one name. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Cyclopes are three sons of Earth and Sky, master smiths whose names mean Thunder, Lightning and Bright — Brontes, Steropes and Arges. They forge the thunderbolt for Zeus. Homer’s Cyclopes, in Book 9 of the Odyssey, are something else: a lawless tribe of giant shepherds on a remote island, who plant nothing, hold no assemblies and pay no attention to the gods. The most famous of them is Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon.

Odysseus and twelve of his men wander into Polyphemus’s cave, help themselves to his cheese and wait to meet their host. It goes badly. The giant traps them inside with a boulder and begins eating them, two at a time. The escape that follows contains the best joke in Greek epic — and it is a joke about grammar.

Nobody, and somebody clever

Odysseus tells the giant that his name is Outis, “Nobody.” He gets Polyphemus drunk, then blinds him with a sharpened, fire-hardened stake. Polyphemus roars for help, and his neighbours gather outside the cave to ask what is wrong. He bellows that Nobody is killing him. Very well, they answer: if nobody is hurting you, it must be an illness sent by Zeus, so pray to your father — and they go back to bed.

The neighbours’ reply hides a second pun. In their Greek, “if nobody” is ei mē tis, and mē tis sounds exactly like mētis, “cunning intelligence,” the very quality Odysseus is famous for. Homer lets the joke land twice: the man called Nobody escapes because of his mētis. Then Odysseus spoils it by shouting his real name from the departing ship, which is how Poseidon finds out whom to punish for the next ten years.

cyclops noun

  1. WordGreek kyklōps, “round-eye,” from kyklos + ōps.
  2. MythHesiod’s thunder-smiths and Homer’s one-eyed shepherds.
  3. NowA one-eyed giant; also Cyclops, a genus of tiny freshwater crustaceans with a single eye-spot.

Walls only a giant could lift

Later Greeks looked at the fortifications of Bronze Age citadels such as Mycenae and Tiryns — walls of enormous, roughly shaped boulders fitted together without mortar — and could not imagine ordinary people building them. The travel writer Pausanias reports the local tradition that the walls of Tiryns were the work of Cyclopes. Archaeologists still use the term: Cyclopean masonry is the technical name for that style of construction. And in everyday English, cyclopean has grown into a general word for anything colossal.

cyclopean adjective

  1. WordFrom Cyclops, via Latin Cyclopeus.
  2. MythThe belief that giants built the walls of Tiryns and Mycenae.
  3. NowBuilt of huge irregular stones; by extension, gigantic.

The moth with a famous name

Polyphemus’s own name is a word puzzle. Greek polyphēmos can mean “much spoken of” — famous — or “many-voiced,” noisy. Both fit a giant whose bellowing brings the whole island running.

And in Canada, the name flies. The Polyphemus moth, Antheraea polyphemus, is one of the largest moths in North America, a tawny giant silk moth found across southern Canada as well as the United States. Its hind wings each carry a large round eyespot ringed with yellow and black, which it flashes when disturbed — two staring “eyes” that gave naturalists the obvious name. If you have ever found a moth the size of your palm clinging to a porch light on a June night in Ontario, Quebec or the Maritimes, you may have met Polyphemus. The adult moths do not feed at all; they live for about a week, long enough to mate and lay eggs. A brief, quiet life for a creature named after the loudest giant in Homer.

Polyphemus proper noun

  1. WordGreek polyphēmos, “much spoken of” or “many-voiced.”
  2. MythThe Cyclops blinded by Odysseus in Odyssey 9.
  3. NowThe Polyphemus moth, a giant silk moth with eyespots, at home in southern Canada.

One round eye, then. Out of it came a family of smiths, a grammatical joke, a style of archaeology, a crustacean and a moth. Not a bad harvest for a single syllable of Greek.

Notes and sources

  1. Hesiod, Theogony 139–146, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914); Homer, Odyssey 9.105–566, trans. Samuel Butler (1900) and A. T. Murray (1919), via Perseus.
  2. Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.25.8 and 2.16.5, on the walls of Tiryns and Mycenae.
  3. On the Polyphemus moth, see the species accounts published by Canadian natural history museums and provincial field guides.