Transformations of Polyphemus
Depictions of the Cyclops Polyphemus have differed radically, depending on the literary genres in which he has appeared, and have given him an individual existence independent of the Homeric herdsman encountered by Odysseus. In the epic he was a man-eating monster dwelling in an unspecified land. Some centuries later, a dithyramb by Philoxenus of Cythera, followed by several episodes by the Greek pastoral poets, created of him a comedic and generally unsuccessful lover of the water nymph Galatea. In the course of these he woos his love to the accompaniment of either a cithara or the pan-pipes. Such episodes take place on the island of Sicily, and it was here that the Latin poet Ovid also set the tragic love story of Polyphemus and Galatea recounted in the Metamorphoses. Still later tradition made him the eventually successful husband of Galatea and the ancestor of the Celtic and Illyrian races. Location
From at least the fifth-century BC onwards, Cyclopes have been associated with the island of Sicily, or the volcanic Aeolian islands just off Sicilys north coast. The fifth-century BC historian Thucydides says that the "earliest inhabitants" of Sicily were reputed to be the Cyclopes and Laestrygones (another group of man-eating giants encountered by Odysseus in Homers Odyssey). Thucydides also reports the local belief that Hephaestus (along with his Cyclopean assistants?) had his forge on the Aeolian island of Vulcano.Euripides locates Odysseus Cyclopes on the island of Sicily, near the volcano Mount Etna, and in the same play addresses Hephaestus as "lord of Aetna".
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