40 Fun Facts About Cyclops

A large central nasal opening in the skull of which animal may have inspired Cyclops legends?

Elephant skulls have a wide central hole for the trunk that can pass for a single giant eye socket. Palaeontologist Othenio Abel suggested the link in 1914, though later scholars doubt it.

Which false name did Odysseus give Polyphemus so the Cyclops's cries for help made no sense?

Nobody, or Outis in Greek, was the trick: when the blinded giant cried that Nobody was hurting him, his neighbours shrugged and went home.

The Navy coal carrier USS Cyclops, which vanished without trace in 1918, is often linked to which region?

Bermuda Triangle lore claims the vessel, though a heavy ore cargo, engine trouble and bad weather are likelier culprits. Two of its sister colliers later vanished at sea as well.

To the ancient Greeks, the name Cyclops, from the words kyklos and ops, meant which of these?

Round eye is the literal sense: kyklos means circle and ops means eye. Hesiod says the giants got the name from the single circular eye set in the middle of their foreheads.

Odysseus escaped the cave of the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus by clinging to which part of a ram?

Its belly was the one place the blind giant never checked: he stroked each animal's back as it left the cave. Odysseus hid in the fleece under the biggest ram, his men under others tied in threes.

Which weapon did Hesiod's three Cyclopes forge for Zeus after he freed them from prison?

Thunderbolt in hand, Zeus went on to defeat the Titans and take the throne of the gods. The brothers' names fit the gift: Brontes, Steropes and Arges mean Thunder, Lightning and Bright.

Which god did the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus call on as his father to curse Odysseus's voyage home?

Poseidon heard the prayer: Odysseus took ten years to reach Ithaca and arrived alone, on a stranger's vessel, with every one of his men lost.

What rash mistake did Odysseus make as he sailed away from the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus?

He shouted his real name across the water, boasting that Odysseus of Ithaca had done the deed. That let the giant name him in a curse, and the gods made sure it came true.

Which Arabian Nights hero blinds a man-eating, Cyclops-like giant with red-hot iron spits?

Sinbad meets the monster on his third voyage, after it has roasted several of his shipmates. The translator Richard Burton noted that the giant was plainly modelled on Polyphemus.

In Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books, which young Cyclops turns out to be Percy's half-brother?

Tyson first appears in The Sea of Monsters as a homeless schoolmate whom Percy befriends. The same book sends the heroes to rescue their friend Grover from Polyphemus himself.

Legend says the Cyclopes built the walls of which Greek citadel, entered through the Lion Gate?

Mycenae's walls use boulders so heavy that later Greeks could not believe ordinary men had moved them. The style is still called Cyclopean masonry, and nearby Tiryns earned the same legend.

Ancient poets set the Cyclopes' forge beneath which volcano, whose smoke the myth helped explain?

Mount Etna's fire and rumbling were put down to the giants hammering away underground. Other writers moved the workshop to the small volcanic islands just to the north.

Which god is said to have killed the Cyclopes after their handiwork felled his son Asclepius?

Apollo could not strike at Zeus, who had killed the healer for raising the dead, so he took revenge on the craftsmen instead. His punishment was a spell as herdsman to the mortal king Admetus.

Which god hated his sons, Hesiod's three Cyclopes, and locked them underground at birth?

Uranus loathed all his monstrous children and thrust each one back into the earth as it was born. His son Cronus toppled him but left the one-eyed brothers locked away.

Which primordial goddess, mother of the Titans, also gave birth to the first three Cyclopes?

Gaia bore them after the Titans and, furious at seeing her children shut away, armed her youngest Titan son with a sickle to overthrow their father.

The Cyclopes were cast into which pit, said to lie as far below the earth as the sky is above?

Tartarus was the deepest part of the Greek underworld and later the jail of the defeated Titans too. Zeus released the one-eyed smiths from it to gain allies in his war for the throne.

From Callimachus onward, poets cast the Cyclopes as assistants at the forge of which Greek god?

Hephaestus was born too late to arm Zeus for the war with the Titans, so the first myths gave that job to the one-eyed brothers. Later poets simply merged the two sets of divine metalworkers.

In Apollodorus, which gift from the Cyclopes made Hades invisible in the war on the Titans?

A helmet, known as the cap of invisibility, was their present to the lord of the dead. It was later lent out: the hero Perseus wore it to slip away after beheading Medusa.

Which fifty-headed giants were the brothers of the Cyclopes and shared their underground prison?

Hecatoncheires means Hundred-Handed Ones: Cottus, Briareus and Gyges each had a hundred arms to go with the fifty heads. Once freed, they pelted the Titans with enormous boulders.

Which drink, a gift from the priest Maron, did Odysseus use to send the Cyclops Polyphemus to sleep?

Wine this strong was normally mixed with twenty parts of water, and Odysseus served it neat. Three bowls later the giant collapsed, giving the Greeks their chance.

What stopped Odysseus from killing the Cyclops Polyphemus with his sword while the giant slept?

The cave's door stone was so heavy that twenty-two wagons could not have shifted it, and only the giant could roll it aside. Kill him and the Greeks would have been sealed in for good.

Odysseus blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus with a stake cut from the giant's own club of which wood?

Olive wood, still green, formed a club as big as a ship's mast. Odysseus cut off about six feet, sharpened it, hardened the point in the fire and hid it under the dung on the cave floor.

Odysseus and his men found the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus stocked with racks of which food?

Cheese filled the racks because the giant was a careful dairy farmer who milked his ewes and goats himself. The crew begged Odysseus to grab some and run; he insisted on staying to meet the owner.

By eating Odysseus's men, the Cyclops Polyphemus broke xenia, the sacred Greek code of what?

Hospitality to strangers was protected by Zeus himself, and a guest could expect a meal and a parting gift. The giant sneered that his kind cared nothing for Zeus, then ate two of his visitors.

Which sea nymph does the lovesick Cyclops Polyphemus woo with songs in poems by Theocritus and Ovid?

Galatea turns him down for his looks, and Homer's savage becomes an absurd, lovesick shepherd. In Theocritus he finds that singing about her is the only cure for the heartache.

In Ovid, what did young Acis become after the jealous Cyclops Polyphemus crushed him with a rock?

A river sprang from his blood as it trickled out from under the rock, transformed by the sea nymph who loved him. Handel later set the story as a pastoral opera in English.

The ancient Athenian drama Cyclops is the only complete surviving example of which stage genre?

Satyr play was the bawdy afterpiece staged after a set of three tragedies, with a chorus of satyrs for comic relief. Here they are the giant's unwilling slaves, herding his flock.

In Virgil's epic, which Trojan hero rescues a Greek sailor Odysseus left behind among the Cyclopes?

Aeneas takes the castaway Achaemenides aboard and casts off with the blinded Polyphemus in pursuit. The scene lets Virgil tie his Roman epic directly to Homer's.

The Cyclopean Isles, said to be rocks Polyphemus hurled at Odysseus, lie off which Italian island?

Sicily's east coast has the sea stacks just off the village of Aci Trezza. Geologists give them a less dramatic origin: they are columns of basalt about half a million years old.

Which seer warned the Cyclops Polyphemus that a man named Odysseus would one day take his sight?

Telemus had lived among the giants as their resident prophet. Polyphemus admits he ignored the warning because he expected a towering hero, not a puny stranger with a skin of strong drink.

What is the real name of Cyclops, the visor-wearing field leader of Marvel's X-Men?

Scott Summers was the first student Professor X recruited, and the beams from his eyes never switch off. Only his own eyelids or lenses of ruby quartz can hold them back.

Which cartoon stars Leela, a one-eyed spaceship captain who believes she is an alien Cyclops?

Futurama eventually reveals that she is no alien at all but a mutant born in the sewers of New New York. Her parents left her at an orphanage with a note in strange symbols to give her a better life.

Who played Big Dan Teague, the one-eyed Cyclops figure of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?

John Goodman's Bible salesman invites the heroes to a picnic lunch, then mugs them. The Coen brothers loosely based the film on the Odyssey, right down to a hero named Ulysses.

The tiny water flea named Cyclops, after its single eye, belongs to which group of animals?

Crustaceans called copepods make up the genus, which holds hundreds of species. Each has one large eye, red or black, and that was enough to earn the giant's name.

The Polyphemus moth of North America takes its name from which feature of its hindwings?

Large eyespots, one on each hindwing, stare out like the single eye of Homer's giant. The moth flashes them to distract predators, and its wings can span about 15 centimetres.

Herodotus told of the one-eyed Arimaspians of the far north, who battled which gold-guarding beasts?

Griffins, part eagle and part lion, were said to guard the gold of the far north. Every such tale goes back to one lost poem by Aristeas, who claimed to have travelled there in a divine frenzy.

Which English painter exhibited the canvas Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus at the Royal Academy in 1829?

J. M. W. Turner has the hero raise his arms in victory on deck as his galley sails away from the island. The critic John Ruskin called it the central picture of the painter's career.

Which French Symbolist painted The Cyclops, in which a giant peers over a hill at a sleeping nymph?

Odilon Redon may have drawn on more than Greek myth: one-eyed giants also fill the folklore of Aquitaine, where he grew up. The picture now hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.

Statues of Odysseus blinding the Cyclops adorned the seaside dining cave of which Roman emperor?

Tiberius dined in the grotto at Sperlonga and was nearly killed there when it collapsed in AD 26. The shattered statues lay buried until engineers building a coastal road found them in 1957.

Homer names which sea nymph, a daughter of Phorcys, as the mother of the Cyclops Polyphemus?

In Hesiod, Thoosa's father Phorcys also sired the Gorgons, so by mixing the two poets Medusa becomes the one-eyed giant's aunt.