After Troy Odysseus told Alcinous how his company met the Lotus-eaters whose fruit erased homecoming, then entered the cave of Polyphemus — until strong wine, the name Nobody, and a heated stake earned Poseidon's relentless wrath.1
The Lotus-eaters
From Troy Odysseus sailed with twelve ships to the land of the Lotus-eaters, who lived on the flower's fruit. Three scouts ate and forgot all desire to return; Odysseus dragged them weeping back to the ships and drove the rest away from the shore lest others taste forgetfulness.2
The lawless shepherds
On the next island — some say the land of the Cyclopes — Odysseus entered a vast cave stocked with cheese and lambs, the lair of Polyphemus son of Poseidon. Homer describes the Cyclopes as lawless shepherds who trust in the gods but plant nothing, build no ships, and live each in his own hill-cave apart from neighbours.3
Nobody's wine
Polyphemus sealed the entrance with a mountain stone and devoured two companions at each meal. Odysseus gave him strong wine — the same Maronean vintage he had received at Ismarus — and told the giant his name was Nobody. When Polyphemus slept drunk, the Greeks heated a stake in the fire and drove it into the one eye; the blinded Cyclops cried to his kin that Nobody was killing him, and they did not come.4
Beneath the ram
At dawn Polyphemus felt the backs of his sheep as they went out but did not think to touch their bellies, where Odysseus and his men clung beneath the rams. Once aboard ship, Odysseus could not resist shouting his true name — and the Cyclops prayed to Poseidon that the man of many wiles might never reach home, or come alone, late, and in a stranger's ship, with all his comrades lost.5
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How the centuries saw it
Odysseus and his men blinding Polyphemus (Eleusis Amphora, detail)
Polyphemus Painter (proto-Attic), c. 660 BC
The oldest surviving Cyclops scene — Nobody's cunning stake earns Poseidon's endless enmity after the lotus and the cave.
Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus
J. M. W. Turner, 1829
Dawn bursts over the escaping fleet while the blinded giant, half cloud and half mountain, writhes above the bay — Turner's answer to Odyssey 9, all light where the cave was all dark.
On screen
Ulysses
Mario Camerini
Kirk Douglas' Odysseus faces the Cyclops on screen — the stake, the name Nobody, and the wine that blinds the giant.
The Odyssey
Andrei Konchalovsky
The miniseries gives Book IX its runtime — lotus forgetfulness, then Polyphemus' cave before Poseidon's wrath begins.