EURIPIDES
Silenus form a standard part of satyric convention, and their
characters are accordingly stylized: the satyrs are boisterous,
childlike "horse-men" (not "goat-men") with a strong streak
of cowardice, while Silenus is at every point the ancestor of
Falstaff—lewd, fat, bald, drunken, boastful, knavish, and fool-
ish. Finally, it needs to be stressed that, however comic a
satyr-play may seem, it is not to be confounded with Greek
comedy, which differs from it not only in its material (usually
free invention or mythological burlesque), but in structure,
conventions, and the degree of topicality and license.
In plot and detail Euripides' adaptation of his Homeric
material is remarkably close. If Odysseus here does not escape
from the cave by clinging to a ram's belly, and .if the immense
boulder which in Homer blocked the cave has here been
rolled away, these are clearly alterations demanded by the
necessities of theatrical presentation. In Euripides the Cyclops
is still the creature of his belly, a barking barbarian, and
Odysseus is still in some sense the shrewd and civilized man
who manages by exercise of mother wit to mutilate the man-
eating monster and escape. Or so, at least, it might seem if we
possessed only the first half of the play. But the Cyclops is
not merely a dramatic retelling of Homer; rather, it is Homer's
parable of the civilized man and the savage systematically
anachronized into its fifth-century equivalent, an altogether
different parable.
Neither Odysseus nor Polyphemus is really Homeric at all.
Odysseus is not the type of the civilized man, and the Eu-
ripidean Cyclops, like the United States in Wilde's epigram,
has passed directly from barbarism to decadence without
pause for civilization. Both manifest late fifth-century types of
corruption: Odysseus' Homeric heroism in its new context is
systematically undercut, less heroism than a transparent vain-
glory and depraved eloquence; Polyphemus is less Caliban
than Callicles, an outright exponent of philosophical egoism
and the immoralist equation of might and right. Euripides
has taken considerable pains, moreover, to indicate to his
audience that this is no longer Homer's world, but their own*
Thus, when Odysseus first appears, he is greeted by Silenus
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