My friends, my neighbours—sons of the sea, daughters of the olive groves—come close and listen! Let the market’s noise fade, let the smell of fish and figs drift away, for now we speak of heroes and the will of the gods.

Tonight, I give you the tale of Odysseus and the Cyclops—how a cunning man faced a giant and lived to tell it.

After the fall of Troy, Odysseus, king of Ithaca, sailed home across the wine-dark sea. But the gods—ah, the gods—they love to twist the road for mortal men.

One day, he came to an island rich with goats and sweet grass. His men, eager for food, begged him to take what they could and leave. But Odysseus wished to see the people of the land and learn what gifts they might offer.

So they found a great cave, its walls stacked with cheese, its pens filled with bleating sheep. And they waited.

The ground shook. The doorway darkened. And in stepped Polyphemus, the Cyclops—taller than three men, with one great eye in the middle of his brow.

He shut the cave with a slab of stone no twenty men could move. Then he asked: “Who are you, and why are you here?”

Odysseus answered with honeyed words, but the Cyclops roared, and in a moment of terror, he seized two men, smashed them, and ate them for supper.

Day after day, the same—until Odysseus thought of a plan.

He offered the giant a skin of strong wine. Polyphemus drank deep, and when his mind grew heavy, Odysseus said, “My name is Nobody.”

When the Cyclops slept, they drove a sharpened stake into his eye. He bellowed, the cave rang with his cries, and his brothers called from outside: “Who is hurting you?” And Polyphemus wailed: “Nobody! Nobody is hurting me!” So they went away, thinking him mad.

At dawn, Odysseus tied his men beneath the sheep. The blinded giant felt only their woolly backs as they passed. When the last ram left, Odysseus himself clung beneath it.

They reached the shore—safe!—but pride, my friends, pride undid him. As they rowed away, he shouted his true name. And Polyphemus prayed to his father, Poseidon, to bring the sea’s wrath upon him.

And so it was, that the clever man who escaped the cave found himself hunted by the god of the sea for ten long years.