Euripides is not the only ancient dramatist who wrote a Cyclops satyr play.
Aristias of the early fifth century did also. Euripides' play combines the myth of
Dionysus's capture by pirates with the episode in
Homer's
Odyssey of
Odysseus' encounter with the cyclops
Polyphemus. In this scenario Euripides inserts Silenus and the satyrs, comic characters. It relied extensively on the multifarious connotations which surrounded the concepts of "playfulness (
paidia), education (
paideia), child (
pais), slave (
pais), playful (
paidikos), and childishness (
paidia)". In
Cyclops Euripides employed "metapoetically loaded terms" like second and double and new to highlight interactions with his sources, familiar and foundational texts in Athenian education. The characters in
Cyclops are not ignorant of Euripides' sources. "Silenus 'knows his
Odyssey rather well'". Euripides' Cyclops knows about the Trojan War and gives Odysseus his opinion of it. By playing with metapoetic images throughout the play Euripides fostered "a collective consciousness" in his democratic audience and facilitated their recognition that cooperation was necessary throughout Athens if they were to overcome their enemies. It was almost certainly known by Euripides' audience that a particular
Alcander had stuck a stick into the eye of
Lycurgus the Spartan lawgiver. On one level of Euripides' play
Alcibiades thrusts a stake into the eye of "a gross caricature of a Spartan", Like Sophocles'
Philoctetes, Euripides'
Cyclops made an appeal on behalf of Alcibiades that he be allowed to return from exile. Euripides also encouraged his audience to consider the
recent Athenian enterprise against Sicily, which was undertaken for greed against an intractable and difficult enemy when Athens could barely provide money or men and which did not go well. The Homeric Polyphemus is brutish and alien to Odysseus and his crew. The influence of the
Sophists is manifest throughout Euripides' plays "not only in his rhetorical style but also in his skeptical, down‐to‐earth approach". In
Cyclops both Odysseus and the Cyclops employ deft and appropriative rhetorical manipulation, "aggressive sophistry that reduces men to meat, and fine talk to deceptive barter". Gluttonous ingestion is a theme and "[t]he imagery of grotesque ingestion surfaces almost immediately in the play". Euripides' Cyclops has been described as "a figure of proto-
Rabelaisian excess" and linked to ideas contained in the work of
Mikhail Bakhtin. Polyphemus "likes to talk, he likes to eat, [...] to talk about eating, or to try to eat those who talk to him". Euripides often dealt with "the consequences of impiety". But in his play his Cyclops is punished for impiety by having his eye burned out. The location of the cyclopes in the
Odyssey is not specified, but Euripides'
Cyclops is set in
Sicily, possibly following
Epicharmus, portrayed as barbarous and desolate and hostile. This was not an accurate representation of Sicily. This is mentioned by every character in the play. According to Carl A. Shaw, the chorus of satyrs in a satyr play were "always trying to get a laugh with their animalistic, playfully rowdy, and, above all, sexual behavior." Satyrs were widely seen as mischief-makers who routinely played tricks on people and interfered with their personal property. They had insatiable sexual appetites and often sought to seduce or ravish both nymphs and mortal women alike (though not always successfully). After Dionysus grew to maturity, Silenus became one of his most devout followers and was perpetually drunk. When the satyrs identify the Cyclops as a "son of Earth" and present their firebrand as igniting the Cyclops' skull rather than his eye they mimic a traditional Orphic incantation and Zeus's punishment of the
Titans, the "sons of Earth" and primordial enemies of the Orphic Dionysus. The central focus of Orphism is the suffering and death of the god Dionysus at the hands of the Titans, which forms the basis of Orphism's central myth. In the play the satyrs are
devotees of Dionysus and on the island of Sicily, known to be "a center of
Orphic cult".
Cyclops has been both lauded and scorned, with hostile commentators criticising its simplicity of plot and characterisation. There is little agreement. According to critics the play is derived entirely from the Homeric episode or mostly from the Homeric episode, is an interrogator of Homeric and tragic portrayals, or "a rival version of a Homeric episode with new contemporary implications." ==Translations==