Me and Polyphemus. I remain on Ulysses’ side – the founding myth of the West – but today I know what he leaves behind in the cave

As a child, I watched "The Odyssey" on Channel One, the version introduced by Ungaretti’s reading and starring Irene Papas. I’ve forgotten almost everything else, but I remember the terror of Polyphemus: that gigantic eye in the centre of his forehead which, at one point, became Odysseus’s target. He was the monster. There was no doubt about it. Watching that story again today in Nolan’s "Odyssey", I realise that my perspective has changed. Polyphemus no longer frightens me. But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped siding with Ulysses. The Cyclops strikes me as a creature of immense proportions, yet at the same time a prisoner of his own immensity: a gentle, primal giant, trapped within a body that seems to have already decided for him what place he might occupy in the world. Nolan constructs him with explicit reference to Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Sons”; for the cave, production designer Ruth De Jong cited, more generally, Böcklin’s “Black Paintings” and “The Isle of the Dead”. Yet the result seems, curiously, to echo Odilon Redon’s Polyphemus as well: no longer merely the Homeric monster, but an enormous and almost defenceless creature, condemned to its own deformity and its single, immense eye.

He lives in his cave, tending to his beasts, repeating a meagre and compulsory routine. He knows nothing of the polis, the laws of hospitality, or the reciprocity upon which the Greeks based the distinction between civilisation and barbarism. But who has decided that he ought to know them? Odysseus and his men burst into his space, consume whatever they find, and demand hospitality. Polyphemus reacts to the intrusion. Of course, Homer does not allow us to absolve him: he devours Odysseus’s men, and Odysseus must save himself. But it is precisely here that the myth, viewed through contemporary eyes, becomes more ambiguous. For Odysseus’s cunning is not merely a weapon of survival. It is a form of power. Ulysses observes the world, discovers its weak point and exploits it. The name, language, deception, technique: everything that constitutes his mēetis – that agile and adaptive intelligence – is also the arsenal with which he transforms whatever he encounters into something subject to his own will.

And so Polyphemus ceases for a moment to be merely the monster and becomes the Other: a form of life that does not belong to Odysseus’s order. The eye that terrified me as a child appears to me differently today: it is the only eye through which Polyphemus possesses his world. Odysseus does not merely defeat him. He extinguishes it. But it would be too easy to stop here and mistake this newfound pity for a judgement. I haven’t changed sides. I still recognise myself in Odysseus, perhaps with less innocence. Because in his stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is presented to him, there is something that is deeply rooted in Western history. Odysseus does not simply accept limitations: he seeks a way to overcome them. He does not adapt to the unknown: he wants to understand it. Faced with a force that overwhelms him, he neither kneels nor flees: he observes, calculates, devises a stratagem.

It is a violent impulse, to be sure. But it is also one of the foundations of our progress. The very same intelligence that blinds Polyphemus will build ships capable of crossing the oceans, instruments capable of measuring the heavens, and medicines capable of freeing us from illnesses that for millennia we have called fate. Behind Odysseus’s meētis, one can already glimpse one of the great Western promises: that natural limits are not necessarily a death sentence. Of course, we are also familiar with the other side of that promise. If the world is something that can be known, transformed and bent to our needs, sooner or later other people too may become material to be transformed and bent. Exploration and conquest, science and exploitation, emancipation and domination are not the same thing, but throughout our history they have often walked hand in hand. Ulysses carries this ambivalence with him from the very beginning.

Perhaps that is why the story of Polyphemus seems more significant to me today than it did when I was a child. Back then, it had a perfect moral structure: the small man against the monstrous giant, intelligence against strength, civilisation against barbarism. Today, that structure has cracked, but it has not been overturned. I still side with the man who wants to leave the cave. It’s just that now I can also see what he leaves behind. Perhaps this is also what it means to grow up: to continue loving one’s founding myths after having lost their innocence. Odysseus remains one of our heroes. But in Polyphemus’s lifeless eye we can finally see the price of his victory – and, in part, of ours.