This chilling scene on the neck of a Proto-Attic amphora from the early seventh century B.C. portrays the encounter of Odysseus with the giant, Polyphemus, who was called the Cyclops because he had a single eye in the middle of his forehead. Odysseus and his men, trapped in the cave of Polyphemus, managed to escape by getting the giant drunk on wine and then, after he had fallen asleep, blinding him by thrusting a glowing olive wood pole into his eye socket. Homer describes the result in a passage of gruesome intensity (Odyssey, IX: 389–94):

“The blast and scorch of the burning ball singed all his eyebrows and eyelids, and the fire made the roots of his eye crackle. As when a man who works as a blacksmith plunges into cold water a great axe or adze which hisses aloud, ‘doctoring’ it, since this is the way that steel is made strong, even so Cyclops’s eye sizzled about the beam of the olive.” (Translation after that by Richard Lattimore)

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