They have a unique ability to incorporate heavenly materials, like sunlight, moonlight, and lightning into their products as well, which makes them popular smithies with the gods. They are also talented masons because their strength allows them to transport and stack massive stones, building tall, impenetrable walls. In a few rare cases, these beasts have been unleashed on the battlefield to devastating effect. Their bloodlust, combined with a dull intellect, means that they will willingly lead the charge onto a battlefield and slaughter hundreds of men.
After the creature gained popularity in poems and legends, he was taken as a study of subject for early scholars like Plato, Ovid, and Pliny the Elder. The most famous Cyclopes in history is Polyphemus , who stars in The Odyssey and, subsequently, appears in various other tales. Polyphemus was a giant shepherd who lived in a cave on a mountainous island.
Accordingly, the men approached the beast in his cave, and Odysseus requested that the Cyclops honor the gods by welcoming them into his home. Unfortunately, the rest of their sea-voyage was miserable because Poseidon , father of Polyphemus, was angry that they had wounded the Cyclops.
Second to Polyphemus, the most famous Cyclopes are a trio of brothers: Brontes thunder , Steropes lightning and Arges bright. According to Theogony , these brothers were born to the titans Uranus sky and Gaia earth , but their father feared their strength and exiled them Tartarus, a horrible abyss that lies even below Hades.
Eventually, Zeus freed the brothers from their terrible dungeon, and in return, they forged thunderbolts for him to use in his next plot: the overthrow of the titans. With the Titans deposed, Zeus allowed the Cyclopes free roam of the world, but many years in Tartarus had warped their minds, and they preferred to remain underground at their forges.
The monsters may have represented a very real group of people, a group that had a reputation for being strong, solitary types: blacksmiths. During Greek times, they were also very protective of their trade secrets, passing their knowledge on to only one or two apprentices and giving everyone else the cold shoulder.
Tellingly, many blacksmiths also wore a patch over one eye, to prevent the sparks and smoke from their forge from blinding them in both eyes. Another explanation for Cyclopes is the dwarf elephant, a species that roamed Greece long before Greeks did. In reality, this opening was a naval cavity that connected to the trunk, but it may well have looked like an eye cavity to a Greek person, who had never seen a dwarf elephant.
Finally, a condition called cyclopia may have been brought on by the use of white hellebore, a dangerous mutagen which the Greeks mistook for a medical herb. Children born with cyclopia have a conjoined eye beneath their nose, which would certainly alarm any Greek person.
However, cases of cyclopia, even when the mother is exposed to white hellebore, are very rare, and the children rarely live past infancy, making it unlikely that they would be connected with a giant race of monstrous strength. Sign in. They provide Zeus' thunderbolt, Hades ' helmet of invisibility, and Poseidon's trident, and the gods use these weapons to defeat the powerful titans. In a famous episode of Homer's Odyssey , the hero Odysseus encounters the cyclops Polyphemus, son of Poseidon and the nymph Thoosa , who lives with his fellow cyclopes in a distant country.
The connection between the two groups has been debated in antiquity and by modern scholars, and it is upon Homer's account that Euripides and Virgil based their accounts of the mythical creatures. Among others, German scholar Walter Burkert suggests that the archaic groups or societies of lesser gods mirror real cult associations: "It may be surmised that smith guilds lie behind cabeiri , idaian dactyloi , telchines , and cyclopes.
The cyclopes seen in Homer's Odyssey are of a different type from those in the Theogony , and have no connection to smithing. It is possible that independent legends associated with Polyphemus did not make him a cyclops before the Odyssey ; Polyphemus may have been some sort of local daemon or monster in original stories.
Another possible origin for the legend, advanced by the paleontologist Othenio Abel in , is the prehistoric dwarf elephant skulls — about twice the size of a human skull — that may have been found by the Greeks on Cyprus, Crete, Malta and Sicily. Abel suggested that the large, central nasal cavity for the trunk in the skull might have been interpreted as a large single eye-socket.
Given the inexperience of the locals with living elephants, they were unlikely to recognize the skull for what it actually was. White hellebore, a herbal medicine described by Hippocrates before BC, contains the alkaloids cyclopamine and jervine, which are teratogens capable of causing cyclopia and holoprosencephaly, severe birth defects in which a fetus can be born with a single eye.
Students of teratology have raised the possibility of a link between this developmental deformity in infants and the myth for which it was named. Regardless of the connection between the herb and the birth abnormalities, it is possible these rare birth defects may have contributed to the myth. Using phylogenetics tools, Julien d'Huy has reconstructed the history of the versions of Polyphemus back to the Paleolithic. The cyclops is generally described as a one-eyed monster possessing a huge body and, sometimes, fearsome tusks.
As the skin is usually shown to be tough enough to protect them from the ancient Greek bronze weapons and arrows, the eye is sometimes the only weak spot of a cyclops. Sharp claws, pointy ears, either fat or muscular bodies and one or more horns are not uncommon in modern sources, most likely to make them more monstrous than their mythological counterparts.
The size of the adult cyclops can vary by source, but as primordial beings, they are usually depicted to be much larger than regular humans, mostly more than twice the size of the human average, and even larger than gigantes sometimes. The tusk size, if such are present, is usually compared to the dwarf elephant's or, in modern fiction, to a sharper version of the African elephant's.
According to Hesiod, they were strong, stubborn, and "abrupt of emotion. Time passed and eventually, they became synonyms for brute strength and power, and they were often pictured at their forge. They remained there, guarded by the dragon Campe , until they and the Hecatonchires, were freed once and for all by their nephews, Zeus , Poseidon , and Hades. To create Zeus' lightning bolt, Arges added the brightness, Brontes added the thunder and Steropes the lightning. The poet Callimachus states on one of his hymns that the Cyclopes helped Hephaestus at his forge.
The Cyclopes were said to be responsible for the cyclopean fortifications at Tiryns and Mycenae in the Peloponnese. According to the hymn, the noises proceeding from the heart of volcanoes were also attributed to the Cyclopes' activities.
According to the tragedy titled Alcestis by Euripides, after Asclepius was murdered by Zeus Apollo killed the Cyclopes in retaliation. Zeus later returned Asclepius and the Cyclopes from the Underworld. In Homer's The Odyssey , the Cyclopes live on a remote island, but rather than being helpful to the sailors, they try to kill and eat Odysseus and his crew.
In retaliation, Odysseus blinded Polyphemus , one of the cyclops. Later, the poet Virgil wrote about Aeneas and his crew landed on the island of the cyclops after escaping from Troy at the end of the Trojan War.
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