Odyssey 9.125 · Book 9, lines 125–130
No ships, no shipwrights
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οὐ γὰρ Κυκλώπεσσι νέες πάρα μιλτοπάρῃοι, οὐδʼ ἄνδρες νηῶν ἔνι τέκτονες, οἵ κε κάμοιεν νῆας ἐυσσέλμους, αἵ κεν τελέοιεν ἕκαστα ἄστεʼ ἐπʼ ἀνθρώπων ἱκνεύμεναι, οἷά τε πολλὰ ἄνδρες ἐπʼ ἀλλήλους νηυσὶν περόωσι θάλασσαν· οἵ κέ σφιν καὶ νῆσον ἐυκτιμένην ἐκάμοντο.
For the Cyclopes have no ships with red cheeks, nor are there men, shipwrights of ships, among them, who might build well-benched ships, which would accomplish each errand, reaching the cities of men — such as men often cross the sea in ships to one another. who for them would also have made this island well-settled.
Word by word
The setting
Odysseus explains why the fertile little island lies empty: the Cyclopes are a people without seafaring. They have no ships and no craftsmen to build them, so they never cross to it or settle it — unlike the sailing peoples who visit one another's shores.
A note on this passage
The reason the island stays wild is technological, and Odysseus lays it out plainly: the Cyclopes have no red-prowed ships and no shipwrights to make them. Ships are what carry men to the cities of others, to trade and to settle; lacking them, the giants never reach the good ground a short crossing offshore.
The undercurrent is a definition of civilization by its tools. To Odysseus — the sailor, the man of many turns — a people without ships is a people cut off, each in his own cave. The sea that isolates the Cyclopes is the same sea that binds the Greeks into a network. He is already measuring his host as the opposite of everything he is.
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