Euripides: Cyclops by Shaw Carl A.;

Euripides: Cyclops by Shaw Carl A.;

Author:Shaw, Carl A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK


πάρες τὸ μάργον σῆς γνάθου, τὸ δ’ εὐσεβὲς

τῆς δυσσεβείας ἀνθελοῦ· πολλοῖσι γὰρ

κέρδη πονηρὰ ζημίαν ἠμείψατο.

Euripides, Cyclops 309–12

But listen to me, Cyclops,

forget about your gluttonous jaw and choose piety

over impiety; for improper profit

has brought in its wake downfall for many people.

These lines offer a standard Odyssean, civilized retort to Polyphemus’ actions, but elsewhere Odysseus presents more contentious contemporary ideas, especially in his treatment of the gods. For example, Zeus is unexpectedly missing from Odysseus’ account of how the hero and his men ended up on the island of the Cyclopes. In the Odyssey, the ship is driven off course by winds sent by the king of the gods, but in Euripides’ version, the weather alone is the cause.52 By removing Zeus from the plot, Euripides reflects contemporary, scientific discussion on natural phenomena and inherently questions the power of the gods.53

Odysseus also addresses the role of the gods in the lives of humans when he is faced with hopeless destruction at the hand of the Cyclops. Like Polyphemus, the hero has doubts about the rule of Zeus:

σύ τ’, ὦ φαεννὰς ἀστέρων οἰκῶν ἕδρας

Ζεῦ ξένι’, ὅρα τάδ’· εἰ γὰρ αὐτὰ μὴ βλέπεις,

ἄλλως νομίζͅῃ Ζεὺς τὸ μηδὲν ὢν θεός.

Euripides Cyclops 353–5

And you, oh Zeus Xenia, who inhabits the shining

seats of the stars, look upon these things. For if you do not see them,

you are wrongly thought to be divine Zeus, when actually you are nothing at all.

Odysseus repeats this sentiment again at 606–7, when he says that if the gods do not save him and his men from dying, then ‘we must consider Chance a god, and the gods subservient to Chance’. This is a powerful shift from Homer’s Odyssey, where the fickleness of the gods is par for the course.54 Odysseus suggests that Zeus is beholden to the constraints that the god has established regarding xenia. In the Homeric epics, however, there are no such guarantees—there is little predictability of divine action in accord with any particular standards.55

The gods’ actions in Homer’s world are based on chance, not on human expectations of the gods’ actions, but the capricious gods are replaced in Euripides’ Cyclops, and they are doubted by both Polyphemus and Odysseus. There is, though, one god in the play who does not suffer any negative comments or depictions, Dionysus. In fact, unlike in Homer’s Odyssey, where Odysseus comes up with his own plan to defeat Polyphemus (9.318), in Euripides’ Cyclops Odysseus receives a divine idea (v. 411), presumably because Dionysus has inspired the hero to use wine to defeat the monster.56 In addition to portraying the god in a positive light, Euripides seems to update Dionysus, using the name Bromios more than any other appellation, a designation that does not appear in epic and is decidedly ‘newer’.57 The mythological world that Euripides explores here has evolved from Homer’s Odyssey. The exploration of xenia remains, but the juxtaposition of civilized and uncivilized is less clear, with Polyphemus and Odysseus being more complex characters who engage in the cultural and philosophical debates of contemporary Athens.



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