How the Natural World Inspires Homer's Cyclops

Christopher Nolan’s release of The Odyssey has swept cinema, and for good reason. From its stellar cast (shoutout to Samantha Morton), Ludwig Göransson’s dramatic score, to the incredible practical effects, every element comes together to bring Homer’s ancient epic to life for a modern audience.

Having very little background in Greek mythology before watching this film, I left the cinema with a question:

How on Earth did the Ancient Greeks come up with these crazy creatures? I mean, these monsters never existed… right?

To answer the latter, absolutely not. But the former question is what I really want to explore.

You see, before the study of the natural world, unusual animals, birth defects, and dangerous natural phenomena were interpreted through stories. The monsters of the Odyssey are no exception; here, they reveal an ancient civilisation’s attempt to understand the living world.

“Limb by limb he tore them to pieces to make his meal, which he devoured like a mountain lion, leaving nothing, neither entrails nor flesh, marrow nor bones […]” Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ (E.V. Rieu’s Translation)

Greek mythology presents different kinds of cyclopes. Hesiodic cyclopes are master craftsmen, forging weapons for Olympian Gods to overthrow the titans, for example Zeus’ thunderbolt. In Homer’s epic, the cyclopes are uncivilised shepherds, who live in caves and make cheese (thought to be the precursor of feta). Though together, their characteristic single, centralised eye underpins them.

Of these portrayals, it is Homer’s man-eating cyclops Polyphemus that has become the most recognisable, perhaps for his deafening roar that made many cinema-goers wish they had brought ear plugs in Nolan’s portrayal of the epic.

So, where did the image of these one-eyed giants come from?

To understand what I believe to be the most intriguing theory, we must first go back to the Ice Age (or Pleistocene epoch), ~2.58 million to 11,700 years ago. It was during this time that two species of dwarf elephant thrived on the Mediterranean island of Sicily (thought to be the island in which Homeric cyclopes lived) up until their extinction.

Othenio Abel, an Austrian palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, eventually tied this theory together in the early 20th century, suggesting that the skulls of these dwarf elephants found in caves on the island of Sicily by the Ancient Greeks inspired the myth.

The skulls of these dwarf elephants are characterised by a large opening at the centre, where Abel theorised that Ancient Greeks mistook this opening for a large eye socket. Really it was the nasal cavity, and connected the trunk to the head of the elephant!

A dwarf elephant skull fossil displayed in Hellabrunn Zoo, Munich.

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Although, I’ll give them some credit, the idea of a single-eyed creature is not entirely beyond the boundaries of biology…

Sheldon J. Plankton from SpongeBob Squarepants is a member of the Cyclops, a near-microscopic group of copepods that possess one eye. However, I doubt the Ancient Greeks had the tools to study such organisms, making this more of a fun fact than a possible theory…

A more plausible theory instead, is through a rare fatal congenital (birth) defect, known as cyclopia.

During embryonic development, the socket within the skull where the eye sits divides into two distinct cavities, a socket for the left eye, and the right eye. This process is achieved through signalling from the foremost part of the developing brain (also named the prosencephalon) to the dividing cavity.

A defect in the signalling from the prosencephalon to the dividing eye cavity can result in an incomplete division of the two eye sockets, and is seen in 1 in 100,000 births.

An illustration of cyclopia.

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Although cases of cyclopia would have been possible in Ancient Greece, it would be quite far-fetched to say such a case directly inspired the cyclops. The more interesting take away is that the cyclops exaggerates a feature that, while exceptionally rare, can actually occur!

The myth therefore occupies a space between imagination and reality, a creature whose defining feature is not so entirely beyond the limits of biology. Perhaps this connection between the unusual and the recognisable is why the cyclops has remained in our cultural conscience for nearly 3,000 years. To many, the creature is not frightening simply because it looks different, but because it represents a familiar form of life pushed to its most extreme.