THE CYCLOPS
This, then, is the sanction Odysseus urges, and it is one
whose irony it would be difficult for his audience to miss. The
irony lies in the fact that an argument normally used to deny
mercy to others is here being used to obtain it. When it fails
before the Cyclops* massive egoism, Odysseus resorts to the
ultimate argument of the weak, law and civilized custom
(nomos). In so doing he joins Thucydides* Plataeans and
Melians, as well as his own victim Hecuba. And, like Hecuba,
failing to receive nomos, he finally resorts to a revenge utterly
unsanctioned by any civilized standards, anomos. The speech
closes on an overt reference to the cost of human suffering in
the Peloponnesian War. And here, as so often in Euripides,
the really serious argument is put in the mouth of a man who
is not qualified to make it, or who contradicts it in his actions.
The contradiction lies in the inverted use of the imperialistic
sanction and the implied indifference to human suffering in
other circumstances.
If Odysseus speaks in part the language of the Athenian im-
perialists and in part the language of the Melians, the Cyclops
outdistances him by far. Devoid of respect for the gods, his re-
ligion is his belly and his right his desires. He speaks exactly
the language of Plato's Thrasymachus and Callicles, a straight-
forward egoism resting on an appeal to Nature for the disre-
gard of morality. Nomos, so far as he is concerned, is a mere
convention of the weak to elude the strong. In the contrast,
then, of Polyphemus and Odysseus we have no Homeric
contrast of barbarism and cool, civilized intelligence, but a
juxtaposition of two related types of civilized brutality whose
difference is merely that of circumstance, one being weak, the
other strong. It is because neither Cyclops nor Odysseus has
any genuine moral dignity, because both of them are shown as
effectively brutal and corrupt, that the bloody blinding of
Polyphemus can come as close to pathos as it does without
becoming any less comic.
The ending is in fact superbly controlled. As usual in Eu-
ripides, the sympathy invoked for one character is suddenly
alienated and shifted to another; the victim and the oppressor
change places. Polyphemus, from being first a Homeric can-
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