Cyclops

The Cyclops, whose name in the Odyssey and other sources is Polyphemus, is an enormous and powerful monster, the son of the sea god Poseidon. Like other Cyclopes, he would have been imagined as very tall humanoid with a single eye in the middle of his forehead. The actor that played him would have been conventionally known as the Protagonist or “First Actor,” since the play is named after this character.

Polyphemus’s defining characteristic is bluster. He is recklessly self-assured of his strength and invincibility, even viewing himself as a god (or something more than a god). His behavior, accordingly, is impious and completely unrestrained: Polyphemus believes that he has nothing to fear from anybody or anything, and even the supreme god Zeus does not concern him. Polyphemus’s lack of guile becomes his undoing: He does not suspect Odysseus’s motives in making him drunk and partakes of the alien beverage without any thought to self-restraint. When his misdeeds are punished by Odysseus’s cunning, Polyphemus does not reflect on his mistakes but continues to bluster, raging and threatening Odysseus (the play ends with him looking for boulders with which to bombard his assailants).

Polyphemus, and the Cyclopes in general, represents an uncultured non-Greek society: His flouting of the conventions of hospitality, his ignorance of viticulture, and his ad hoc domicile, all mark the Cyclops as part of an inferior culture, in line with the somewhat xenophobic values of ancient Greece.

Silenus is the eldest of the satyrs, whom he describes as his children. Like Odysseus, he is a practiced liar and deceiver. In the very first lines of the play he showcases his penchant for inflating his own importance, boasting of his familiarity with Dionysus and his services to the god. But unlike Odysseus, Silenus is easily cowed. When Polyphemus catches Silenus trying to trade his sheep and cheese to Odysseus, Silenus wastes no time fabricating a story about Odysseus being a thief. Silenus clinches his lie with an extravagant oath on the lives of his children. Nor is Silenus much helpful later on while Odysseus is putting into effect his plan to blind the Cyclops: As Odysseus is trying to make the Cyclops drunk with wine, Silenus cannot help stealing from the wine (impeding Odysseus’s plan while rousing the Cyclops’ anger). Silenus in the final analysis is a foil for the tightly wound Odysseus—a deflating lampoon of the grave epic world Odysseus comes from, who lives without any self-control, indulging his every impulse even when doing so results in harm to him. In the play’s moral universe, Silenus’s comeuppance—becoming the victim of Polyphemus’s sexual urges—is just deserts.