Odyssey 2.17 · Book 2, lines 17–20
Aegyptius's son, eaten by the Cyclops
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καὶ γὰρ τοῦ φίλος υἱὸς ἅμʼ ἀντιθέῳ Ὀδυσῆι Ἴλιον εἰς ἐύπωλον ἔβη κοίλῃς ἐνὶ νηυσίν, Ἄντιφος αἰχμητής· τὸν δʼ ἄγριος ἔκτανε Κύκλωψ ἐν σπῆι γλαφυρῷ, πύματον δʼ ὡπλίσσατο δόρπον.
For his dear son too, along with godlike Odysseus, had gone to Ilion of fine foals in the hollow ships — Antiphos the spearman; but the savage Cyclops killed him in his hollow cave, and made him his last supper.
Word by word
The setting
Before the old man speaks, the poet tells us his private wound. One of his four sons, Antiphos, sailed to Troy with Odysseus — and never came home: the Cyclops killed and ate him in the cave. The reader already senses whose journey the delay belongs to.
A note on this passage
A compressed obituary folded into the introduction. Antiphos went to Troy in Odysseus's company, a spearman among the fleet, and died not in the war but on the way back — trapped in the Cyclops's cave and devoured. Homer states the horror flatly: he was made ‘the last supper,’ πύματον δόρπον.
The undercurrent is dramatic irony aimed at one man. The audience knows the Cyclops episode is Odysseus's own famous disaster, still books ahead in the telling; Aegyptius does not yet know how his boy died, only that he is gone. The poem quietly ties this grieving father to the very captain whose voyage cost him the son — and lets us hold the connection he cannot.
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