Euripides: ‘The Cyclops’

 The chorus, a herd of satyrs, bounds into the orchestra, doing high-energy dance steps while herding a bunch of sheep. Each chorister is naked, except for a little goatskin jacket. Each wears a belt, with an enormous phallus in front and a horsetail in back.

A satyr — half man, half horse — is a lewd, obnoxious, untrustworthy creature. When Odysseus and his crew land, starving, the satyrs don’t want to hear about courage and tragedy; they want to know if Odysseus’ crew raped Helen after the fall of Troy. Nothing about a satyr is morally edifying.

The Cyclops is a satyr play, the only complete one we have. They are ribald and impious. The Cyclops’ argument against the existence of gods is that his farts are louder than Zeus’ thunder.

Satyr plays are also short. This one is about half the length of the usual tragedy. In each competition, poets were commissioned to write a trilogy of tragedies with a satyr play at the end.

Scholars disagree about how, exactly, the satyr play fits in with the other dramas and with the festival in honor of Dionysus. You have to remind yourself that the dramatic competitions were part of a religious festival.

William Arrowsmith, in his introduction to The Cyclops, points out that the play is a farce, but a farce of ideas. The notion of civilized brutality gets the playwright’s treatment here.

A political community is based on rules, and underlying the rules is enforcement. If the threat of violence doesn’t work, government uses violence. Euripides’ question is whether that kind of violence is better than the kind of violence that the Cyclops believes in. The Cyclops holds that the strong have every right to eat the weak.

In Homer, Odysseus lands in Sicily, desperate for food and water, and finds he’s in the land of the cyclopes. One, a grizzly character named Polyphemus, bashes the brains out of some of Odysseus’ men and eats them. Odysseus, a clever, civilized man, uses his wits to blind the one-eyed monster, allowing the survivors to escape.

Euripides likes to reverse sympathies. He builds sympathy for one character and then has that character do something so outrageous we begin to sympathize with his enemies.

We sympathize with Odysseus, helplessly watching his men being eaten by a powerful, bullying monster. But as Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk, the Cyclops is transformed. Instead of a monster, we see a drunken buffoon. And we see in Odysseus’ plan to blind him a kind of cruelty that makes us squirm.

Euripides also likes to put great lines in the wrong mouths. In many of his plays, moral truths are spoken by villains. Recipes for ruin are recited by heroes.

This play, produced in honor of the god of wine, has a lot of good lines about the dangers of alcohol. The best, I think, is spoken by the Cyclops to his sidekick, Silenus, the chief satyr:

 

Watch out. You love the wine; it doesn’t love you.

 

• Source: The Cyclops, translated by William Arrowsmith, is in Euripides II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 1-42. The quotation is on p. 34.