In you I brought myself to taste the bread of menial servitude, god though I am. Zeus was the cause: he killed my son Asclepius, striking him in the chest with the lightning bolt, and in anger at this I slew the Cyclopes who forged Zeus’s fire. As my punishment for this Zeus compelled me to be a serf in the house of a mortal. Euripides satyr play Cyclops tells the story of Odysseus encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, famously told in Homers Odyssey. It takes place on the island of Sicily near the volcano Mount Etna where, according to the play, "Poseidon’s one-eyed sons, the man-slaying Cyclopes, dwell in their remote caves." Euripides describes the land where Polyphemus brothers live, as having no "walls and city battlements", and a place where "no men dwell". The Cyclopes have no rulers and no government, "they are solitaries: no one is anyone’s subject." They grow no crops, living only "on milk and cheese and the flesh of sheep." They have no wine, "hence the land they dwell in knows no dancing". They show no respect for the important Greek value of Xenia ("guest friendship). When Odysseus asks if they are pious and hospitable toward strangers (φιλόξενοι δὲ χὤσιοι περὶ ξένους), he is told: "most delicious, they maintain, is the flesh of strangers ... everyone who has come here has been slaughtered. "Several of Euripides plays also make reference to the Cyclopean wall-builders.
According to a version of the story in the Iliad scholia (found nowhere else), when Zeus swallowed Metis, she was pregnant with Athena by the Cyclops Brontes.Although described by Hesiod as "having very violent hearts" (ὑπέρβιον ἦτορ ἔχοντας), and while their extraordinary size and strength would have made them capable of great violence, there is no indication of the Hesiodic Cyclopes having behaved in any other way than as dutiful servants of the gods.Walter Burkert suggests that groups or societies of lesser gods, like the Hesiodic Cyclopes, "mirror real cult associations (thiasoi) ... It may be surmised that smith guilds lie behind Cabeiri, Idaian Dactyloi, Telchines, and Cyclopes." Homeric Cyclopes
In an episode of Homers Odyssey (c. 700 BC), the hero Odysseus encounters the Cyclops Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon, a one-eyed man-eating giant who lives with his fellow Cyclopes in a distant land. The relationship between these Cyclopes and Hesiods Cyclopes is unclear. Homer described a very different group of Cyclopes, than the skilled and subservient craftsman of Hesiod. Homers Cyclopes live in the "world of men" rather than among the gods, as they presumably do in the Theogony. The Homeric Cyclopes are presented as uncivilized shepherds, who live in caves, savages with no regard for Zeus. They have no knowledge of agriculture, ships or craft. They live apart and lack any laws.The fifth-century BC playwright Euripides also told the story of Odysseus encounter with Polyphemus in his satyr play Cyclops. Euripides Cyclopes, like Homers, are uncultured cave-dwelling shepherds.