Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

118 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
shading their heads from the sun with a single huge foot; and the
Kynokephaloi or Dogheads, who communicate by barking.
No figure quite so succinctly epitomizes the horror of the Other,
however, as the Cyclops Polyphemos, whom Odysseus encounters
in Book 9 of The Odyssey. Solitary; monstrous in size; possessing
a single eye in the center of his forehead; stupid; contemptuous
toward the gods; hostile toward strangers; ignorant of seafaring
and agriculture; and a lacto-vegan to boot, except when human
flesh comes his way, Polyphemos is everything that the Greeks
despised. Who could fail to be repulsed by the description of the
regurgitated pieces of flesh that surface at the corners of his giant
maw, as he sleeps off a dinner that consisted of Odysseus’s companions?
And who could fail to applaud when Odysseus blinds his
single eye with a stake, before escaping from the cave by grabbing
onto the belly of Polyphemos’s favorite ram?
This interpretation nonetheless ignores some important facts
that are less than complimentary to our hero. In the first place, the
encounter with the Cyclops could have been avoided altogether if
Odysseus had listened to his companions instead of being guided by
his own insatiable curiosity. It was his fatal curiosity that prompted
him to wait for the Cyclops in his cave, and this, in turn, led to the
deaths of several of his companions. Again, after he escaped, it was
Odysseus’s irrepressible ego that caused him to reveal his name to
the Cyclops, enabling the Cyclops to curse him in the name of his
father Poseidon and delay his homecoming by many years. In short,
the encounter creates the distinct impression that a canny Greek
is by no means intellectually light-years ahead of an ignorant and
uneducated Cyclops. Already in Homer’s day, the category barbarian
was problematic.
THE SPARTAN ALTERNATIVE
Another community worth looking at in some detail is Sparta.
Sparta had none of the civic amenities of Athens. Thucydides
(1.10.2), in a characteristically perceptive exercise in time traveling,
writes:
If Sparta were deserted and only the shrines and foundations of buildings
were preserved, hardly anyone would believe that its power matched
its reputation . . . since the city is not unified and does not possess costly
shrines and public buildings, but consists of villages in the old style Greek
way, whereas if Athens were to suffer the same fate, people would believe
it had double the power from its appearance alone.