The short answer
With a false name, strong wine and patience. Trapped in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus got him drunk and said his name was Noman (Greek Outis, “Nobody”). After they blinded the sleeping giant, his neighbors heard “Noman is killing me” and went home. At dawn the men escaped tied under his rams.
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A guest in the wrong cave
Odysseus tells this story himself, in book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey. With twelve picked men he finds a cave above the sea, stacked with cheeses and crowded with lambs and kids. His men want to grab some cheeses and run. Odysseus wants to meet the owner and see what gift he gives his guests (Odyssey 9.224–229).
He is counting on xenia, the Greek law of hospitality: a host feeds a stranger and gives him a gift, and Zeus watches over travelers. The owner, Polyphemus, answers in his own way.
We Cyclopes do not care about Jove or any of your blessed gods, for we are ever so much stronger than they.
Butler’s Jove is Zeus. Then the giant seizes two of the men and eats them.
The stone no one could move
Odysseus could stab the giant in his sleep, but then they would all die inside: the boulder across the door was too heavy for twenty-two four-wheeled wagons to drag away (9.240–243). The giant has to live, and he has to open the door himself. So Odysseus waits. From the Cyclops’s own club of green olive wood he cuts about six feet, sharpens it, hardens the point in the fire and hides it under the dung (9.319–335).
Wine and a name
His second weapon is wine from Maron, a priest of Apollo at Ismarus, so strong that it was drunk with twenty parts of water (9.196–211). Polyphemus drains three bowls, asks his guest’s name and promises a guest-gift in return.
Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman; this is what my father and mother and my friends have always called me.
The giant’s gift: “I will eat all Noman’s comrades before Noman himself, and will keep Noman for the last.” Then he falls asleep, drunk.
Nobody, and a pun
While he sleeps, five men heat the stake in the embers and blind him with it. His screams bring the other Cyclopes to the cave: is someone hurting you, by trickery or by force? He roars back: “Noman is killing me by fraud; no man is killing me by force.” If no one is hurting him, they reason, he must be ill. They go back to bed.
The Greek is sharper still. Outis means “nobody.” In the neighbors’ reply, “no one” becomes me tis, which sounds just like metis, “cunning,” the very quality Odysseus is famous for. He laughed inside, he says, because his name and his excellent cunning had fooled them all (9.413–414).
Out under the rams
The blind giant now sits in the doorway, hands spread to catch anyone slipping out. Odysseus ties the big woolly rams together in threes with willow withies, a man slung under each middle ram, and hangs beneath the finest ram himself, face up, gripping its fleece. At dawn Polyphemus feels the backs of his flock as it goes out to graze, and never thinks to feel underneath.
The great ram leaves last, and the giant stops it: “My good ram, what is it that makes you the last to leave my cave this morning?” He imagines it is grieving for his eye. Then he lets it go.
Outside, the men drive the flock down to the ship. The shout that came next, Odysseus’s real name hurled from the deck, is why Poseidon was angry with him. The giant himself, and why Homer’s Cyclopes are not Hesiod’s, is on what a Cyclops is in Greek myth.
Sources
- Homer, Odyssey 9.105–470 (tr. Samuel Butler, 1900)