Cyclopes- Greek RaceRace"One-Eyed Giants"

The Elder Cyclopes

Gaia and Ouranos bore three Cyclopes: Brontes, Steropes, and Arges. Thunder, Lightning, and Brightness. Each had a single enormous eye in the center of his forehead.

Ouranos would not let them emerge. He imprisoned them within the earth, along with the Hundred-Handers. Kronos freed them during his revolt against Ouranos, then feared their power and cast them into Tartarus. They stayed there until Zeus made war on the Titans and descended to release them. In gratitude, the Cyclopes forged the weapons that decided the war: the thunderbolt for Zeus and the trident for Poseidon. They gave Hades the Helm of Darkness, which made its wearer invisible. With these, the Olympians won.

The Forge Beneath Etna

After the Titans fell, the Cyclopes continued their work under Hephaestus. Their forge lay beneath Mount Etna, and the Greeks heard the volcano's fires and tremors as the hammers within. There the Cyclopes hammered out thunderbolts for Zeus and crafted weapons for gods and favored heroes.

In Virgil's Aeneid, Venus visits the forge to commission armor for her son Aeneas. The Cyclopes are working on a half-finished thunderbolt when she arrives. Some blow the bellows while others plunge hissing bronze into pools, the cavern groaning under the weight of the anvils. In Callimachus's hymn, the young Artemis visits to request her silver bow. The nymphs who come with her hide, terrified by the giant smiths, their single eyes glowing like shields in the firelight.

A third breed of Cyclopes were neither smiths nor shepherds but builders. Pausanias records that Proetus summoned them from Lycia to fortify Tiryns. The walls they built, of stones fitted without mortar, still stand. At Mycenae, the Lion Gate's lintel alone weighs twenty tons.

The Death of the Smiths

When Zeus struck down Asclepius for raising the dead, Apollo could not take revenge on the king of the gods. He turned on the Cyclopes who had forged the thunderbolt that killed his son and shot them down with his silver bow. The forge beneath Etna fell silent.

Zeus would have thrown Apollo into Tartarus, but Leto pleaded for her son. The sentence was reduced: Apollo would serve a mortal king, Admetus of Pherae, as a cattle herder for one year. In Apollodorus, it was the sons of the original three whom Apollo killed, not the immortal smiths themselves.

Polyphemus and Odysseus

The younger Cyclopes were children of Poseidon, shepherds who lived in caves on a distant island. They showed no hospitality to strangers.

Odysseus and twelve of his crew entered the cave of Polyphemus expecting the welcome that Greek custom owed to travelers. Polyphemus returned with his flock, blocked the entrance with a boulder no twenty men could move, and seized two of the crew. He dashed them against the ground like puppies and ate them, bones and all. The next evening, he ate two more.

Odysseus could not kill the Cyclops while the boulder sealed the cave. He offered Polyphemus strong unmixed wine, and when the giant asked his name, he said "Nobody." Once Polyphemus fell unconscious, Odysseus and his men drove a sharpened stake of olive wood, heated until it glowed, into his single eye.

Polyphemus screamed for help. His neighbors asked who was hurting him. "Nobody is hurting me!" he cried, and they went away. In the morning, blind, he rolled back the boulder to let his flock graze, feeling each animal's back. Odysseus had lashed three rams together for each of his men, who clung beneath the middle one. He himself hung from the fleece of the largest ram. As it passed under the Cyclops's hands, Polyphemus spoke tenderly to it, asking why it lingered and whether it grieved for its master's eye.

Odysseus could not resist. He shouted his true name from the ship. Polyphemus hurled a cliff-top into the sea and called on his father Poseidon to curse the man who had blinded him. Poseidon heard, and Odysseus wandered ten years before he saw Ithaca again.

Polyphemus and Galatea

In Theocritus's Idylls, Polyphemus is not a cannibal but a lovesick boy. He sits on a cliff above the sea, singing to the Nereid Galatea, who will not look at him. He offers her cheese and wildflowers, aware that his single eye repels her. Looking into the calm sea, he decides his reflection is not as ugly as she claims.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the story turns dark. Galatea loves the youth Acis, son of a river nymph. When Polyphemus discovers them together, he tears a chunk from the mountainside and crushes Acis beneath it. Galatea turned his blood into a river that bears his name, flowing clear and cold from under the rock.