Odyssey 9.287 · Book 9, lines 287–290
He seized two of my men
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ὣς ἐφάμην, ὁ δέ μʼ οὐδὲν ἀμείβετο νηλέι θυμῷ, ἀλλʼ ὅ γʼ ἀναΐξας ἑτάροις ἐπὶ χεῖρας ἴαλλε, σὺν δὲ δύω μάρψας ὥς τε σκύλακας ποτὶ γαίῃ κόπτʼ· ἐκ δʼ ἐγκέφαλος χαμάδις ῥέε, δεῦε δὲ γαῖαν.
So I spoke, but he answered me nothing, with pitiless heart, but he sprang up and laid his hands upon my comrades, and seizing two together, like puppies, he smashed them against the ground; and the brains ran out to the ground, and soaked the earth.
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The setting
The lie changes nothing. Polyphemus answers not with words but with his hands: he snatches two of the crew and dashes them on the cave floor like puppies.
A note on this passage
The horror arrives without a pause. The Cyclops does not argue back; he acts, snatching two men and dashing them down. The simile is the cruelest touch — like puppies, small and helpless, killed with the offhand ease of clearing a floor.
The undercurrent is the flatness of the telling. Odysseus, narrating to the Phaeacians, does not raise his voice; he reports the brains on the ground the way he reports the weather. That refusal to editorialize is what makes it land — the scene is monstrous, and the words are calm, and the gap between them is the terror.
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