Jonathan Ready, University of Michigan
Through a close reading of Polyphemus’s song at Cyclops 503–10, this paper (1) adds to the long-running discussion of how Euripides revises Homer’s depiction of the Polyphemus episode, (2) corrects recent interpretations of Polyphemus’s song, and (3) deepens our understanding of how sympotic poetry (melic (monody), elegy, and iambos) depicts the body.
Critics fault Odysseus for revealing his real name to Polyphemus once he and his men escape the cave (Odyssey 9.500–5; Newton 40 n. 63; Rosen 134–5, 165; cf. Austin). With this knowledge, Polyphemus successfully appeals to Poseidon to confound Odysseus’s homecoming (9.528–36). A closer look at Odysseus’s declaration of his name shows that he errs when and because he speaks like a character in the Odyssey and a character in the Iliad simultaneously. Odysseus’s erring by mixing poems finds an analogue elsewhere in the episode if we follow Rosen’s analysis of Odysseus’s insistence upon meeting the Cyclopes in the first place (132): Odysseus’s wish to adopt the pose of the satirist––to introduce satire into the super-genre of epic––lands him in trouble.
As one way to make it easy to root for Odysseus in his Cyclops (cf. Kovacs 55; Rosen 143, 149), Euripides revises these dynamics. His Odysseus moves freely and without adverse consequences between citing, and talking like a character in, the two Homeric epics (e.g, 347–52) and other genres, especially tragedy (e.g., 198–202). By contrast, Polyphemus gets into genre trouble.
The satyr chorus initiates a sympotic song, and Polyphemus, in composing the second stanza (503–10), claims he is “loaded in my hull as a ship up to the top bench of my stomach.” Peter Bing praises Polyphemus: he “has miraculously assimilated conventional sympotic imagery, namely that of the ‘symposium at sea’, where the drinking party is seen as a sea voyage that may or may not reach port in safety” (41). This reading glosses over the fact that Polyphemus introduces the speaking ego’s gross body into his attempt at a monodic song.
Renewed attention to the sympotic body and the body in sympotic song (cf. Baughn; Kurke 213–16; Worman 40–8) shows that, by foregrounding his own gross body, Polyphemus conjures iambic (e.g., Hipponax fragments 42a.2, 95.9–10), not other monodic pieces. His verses also evoke comedy and satyr play (e.g., Aristophanes Wasps 616–18, Clouds 388–91; Euripides Cyclops 326–8).
Polyphemus is unable to produce a suitable sympotic monody. This inability to operate in the proper generic mode differentiates him from the satyrs who craft appropriate songs. His failure to do what the other characters are doing in the matter of singing emblematizes the distance between the two parties when it comes to storyworld knowledge. That is, this disjunction in turn points up the discrepancy in storyworld knowledge between the two parties: the satyrs are in on Odysseus’s plot; Polyphemus is not. Polyphemus thinks he is simply having a new experience of drinking wine. The satyrs know he is falling into a trap.