Order follows strict social laws setting the guidelines for interactions between strangers, family, and friends, which was important in Ancient Greek culture. In Homer’s The Odyssey, the poet observes opposite reflections of order and chaos and strife through many aspects of the story but specifically in the depictions of broken laws, or lawlessness. The cyclops, both their king, Polyphemus, and people, are a depiction of this lawlessness; however, Homer often reflects similar themes within his epic poem through repetition, such as the reoccurring actions that both the cyclops and the suitors demonstrate. This essay explores how the cyclops depict lawlessness through the breaking of hospitality laws as the host, which mirrors the actions of the suitors breaking similar laws as guests. Both reflect a repetition of a theme and illustrate a sameness and difference. The cyclops are significant in providing Odysseus with a challenge to overcome—one he boasts about, which portrays character flaws within Odysseus, and as a means to set a foreground of the lawlessness of the suitors. It is an illustration of order (Odysseus) overcoming the chaos and strife (cyclops and suitors) that lawlessness creates.

 

          To begin, the cyclops are a race of people that are considered, in Odysseus’s telling, to be lawless. They live on a rich island but do not cultivate it, instead, “putting all their trust in the immortal / gods.” (Homer, IX 107-108) They do not plough their fields, nor do they form any institutions for their people. In fact, the very savage lawlessness of the cyclops is described in how they do not even build homes, instead living in caves in the mountain. This lawlessness is shown further through the fact that the cyclops have no laws except that “each one is the law / for his own wives and children and cares nothing about the others.” (IX 114-115)

 

          When we compare the cyclops to the suitors, while there are many differences as they are Achaians, there are some similarities in their lawlessness. The suitors do not follow the laws of approaching Penelope’s father in his lands with bride gifts, but instead, spend their days in Odysseus’s house gaming and taking advantage of Penelope and Telemachos’s hospitality. In fact, like the cyclops, the suitors neither plough, nor form any institutions since they spend their days as they “loiter in our [Odysseus’s] house / and sacrifice our oxen and our sheep and our fat goats / and make a holiday feast of it and drink the bright wine recklessly.” (II 55-58)

        

          This brings us to the laws of hospitality that is seen with both the cyclops and the suitors. For the latter, they enter Odysseus’s house each day where they feast and game without bringing any gifts as guests nor leaving to return to their own homes, instead continuing to lay waste to the wealth of Ithaka. They are not concerned with the laws of hospitality and this shows the vileness of their nature. In fact, the ways the suitors are frequently described with negative adjectives further cements this lawlessness that will only incur the wrath of the gods. “…the haughty suitors. They at the moment / in front of the doors were amusing their spirits with draught games, / sitting about on skins of cattle who they had slaughtered.” (I 106-108) We know that, in Ancient Greece, cattle is only slaughtered during festivals and ceremonies, showing how breaking guest laws were a daily behaviour of the suitors.

         

          For the cyclops, specifically Polyphemus, the law of hospitality is through the host gifts. When Odysseus and twelve of his men enter the cyclops’s cave, Odysseus brings a guest gift and waits despite his men wanting to take things from the cave before the “monstrous figure” returns. This use of negative adjectives to describe the cyclops casts him in the same light as the haughty suitors. Upon his return, Polyphemus breaks host laws by bringing harm to strangers who have asked for “a guest present or otherwise / some gift of grace, for such is the right of strangers,” (IX 267-268) when he killed two of Odysseus’s companions and “cut them limb by limb and got supper ready.” (IX 291) Before Odysseus enacted his plan of escape, Polyphemus had killed and devoured six of Odysseus’s men, leaving him no other choice but to blind the lawless cyclops.

 

          One interesting point to consider is that the lawless, both the cyclops and the suitors, do not see themselves to blame in the consequences of their own actions. Polyphemus, when he is blinded, blames Odysseus (in his disguise as Nobody) and not his own actions when Polyphemus spoke to his ram, “Perhaps you are grieving / for your master’s eye, which a bad man with wicked companions / put out,” (IX 452-454) In turn, the suitors view themselves as blameless in their actions for, when they are called out by Telemachos, they place the blame solely on Penelope by saying to him, “you have no cause to blame the Achaian suitors, / but it is your own dear mother…now it is the third year… / since she has been denying the desires of the Achaians.” (II 87-90) Neither feel they are lawless and deserving of the revenge that Odysseus has and will enact on them.

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          It is with this revenge that we see the shift back to order that is so desired and respected in Ancient Greek culture. While Polyphemus calls upon his father, Poseidon, to keep Odysseus far from his home and to lose all his companions in the journey, he was still left blind, the punishment of revenge for his lawlessness. Odysseus returned to Ithaka and was able to enact his own revenge on the suitors, who broke the laws of hospitality during his absence.

 

          Both the cyclops and the suitors represent that chaos and strife for Odysseus, but his revenge on both allowed for order and law to return, and for interactions to strengthen between Odysseus and his family and friends. In the end, Odysseus found the peace that Ancient Greeks believed came with following the laws set by both culture and gods, which both the cyclops and the suitors ignored to their detriment.

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Works Cited

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Homer. The Odyssey of Homer. Translated by Richmond Lattimore, Harper and Row, 1965.