Reading Notes: Homer's Odyssey, Part A

Notes for Homer's The Odyssey 

A first century CE head of a Cyclops, part of the sculptures adorning the Roman Colosseum by Steven Lek (source: Wikimedia).

Cyclopses 

• Don't have to work for food 
• Have no ocean vessels 
• Nymphs steer goats towards Odysseus's men 
• Polyphemus 
• Solitary Cyclops 
• Lives in a cave 
• Full of cheese and milk 
• Stores whey in separate baskets
• "...the Cyclopses care nothing for aegis-bearing Zeus..."
• Kills and eats two men for each meal 
• Odysseus 
• Wants to see Polyphemus 
• Gets Polyphemus drunk 
• Five men in total volunteer to attack Polyphemus 
• Nobody 
• Makes the other Cyclopses believe that Polyphemus is cursed when Odysseus stabs his eye 
• Escape 
• Three sheep per man, who hides under the middle one
• Odysseus taunts Polyphemus and nearly gets everyone killed 
• Polyphemus prays to Posideon to curse Odysseus
• "...let Odysseus, sacker of cities and son of Laertes, never reach his home on Ithaca: yet if he is destined to see his friends and his fine house in his own country, may he come there late and in sore distress, in another’s ship, losing all comrades, and let him find great trouble in his house.”
• Circe
• Goddess 
• Turns men into pigs 
• Bathes and feed Odysseus
• Reverses spell on pigs so they turn back into men, "...handsomer and taller than they were before."
• Eurylochus 
• One of Odysseus's men 
• The only one to believe Circe's hospitality to be a trap 
• "Remember how Cyclops too behaved, when our friends entered his cave with reckless Odysseus, this man through whose foolishness they died.”
• Odysseus wants to kill Eurylochus for this 
• Hermes
• Gives Odysseus an herb to protect him from Circe and tells him he can evade her spells by sleeping with her 
• The men stay on Circe's island for over a year 
• Odysseus begs Circe to let them go 
• Circe tells him he must do something before returning home: "...you must make another journey. You must seek the House of Hades and dread Persephone, and consult the ghost of the blind Theban seer, Teiresias."