Odyssey 9.451 · Book 9, lines 451–455
The Cyclops speaks to his ram
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Polyphemus — πρῶτος δὲ σταθμόνδε λιλαίεαι ἀπονέεσθαι ἑσπέριος· νῦν αὖτε πανύστατος. ἦ σύ γʼ ἄνακτος ὀφθαλμὸν ποθέεις, τὸν ἀνὴρ κακὸς ἐξαλάωσε σὺν λυγροῖς ἑτάροισι δαμασσάμενος φρένας οἴνῳ, Οὖτις, ὃν οὔ πώ φημι πεφυγμένον εἶναι ὄλεθρον.
First to the fold you long to return in the evening; but now, in turn, you go last of all. Surely you long for your master's eye, which an evil man blinded, with his wretched companions, overpowering my wits with wine — Nobody, who, I say, has not yet escaped destruction.
Word by word
The setting
Blinded, Polyphemus sits at the cave mouth feeling the backs of his flock as they file past, certain the men are hiding among them. His favorite ram — under which Odysseus himself is clinging — comes out last of all, and the giant speaks to it tenderly, wondering why.
A note on this passage
The blinded giant talks to an animal, and the talk is gentle. He notices the ram is out of its usual order — first to pasture every other day, last now — and reads grief into it: the beast, he decides, must be mourning its master's ruined eye.
The horror is in the tenderness. Homer lets the monster love something, and lets him be wrong about it: the ram is last because the man who blinded him is strapped beneath its belly. The audience knows what the giant's hands are inches from and cannot feel. Pity and dramatic irony share a single breath.
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