In Ancient Greek poet Homer’s The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus encounters an island of one-eyed giants, the cyclopes. He sees the abundance on their island, and reminds the cyclops Polyphemus of customs of hospitality in an effort to receive benefits from some of that abundance. The cyclops refuses, and Odysseus maims him brutally. During and after this encounter, Odysseus continues to be represented as sympathetic; It is he who the story follows and we listen to his tales of his past adventures. Given the unwarranted brutally he seems inclined to enact, this depiction feels unnatural and anti-heroic. However, there is no evidence to show that Homer believes Odysseus is in the wrong. The cyclops is a manifestation of Homer, the Ancient Greeks as a whole, and Odysseus’s fears of a world without society.
Both Homer, his audience, Odysseus benefit from the societies in which they live. Homer is an acclaimed poet and bard; Odysseus is a king and hero; those listening to Homer’s tellings of Odysseus’s travels were likely Greek men, who were content with their position under gender in society.
Homer and his audience as such resist and want vanquished any form of being which is independent of or rejects society. The way the cyclopes are organized, be it collectivist or individualistic, is free from society. They are introduced as having “each a law to himself” (Homer 215). This type of organization echoes how many movements have organized themselves, under law of consensus or accord, in which only those who agree to a measure are subjected to it.
Odysseus first tries to enforce Greek customs upon Polyphemus: “we’re at your knees in hopes of a warm welcome, even a guest gift, the sort that hosts give strangers. That’s the custom” (Homer 219). If he believed the cyclops to already participate in his society, he would not have felt the need to remind them of the custom, especially not in a matter of fact manner like he did. Instead, he issued this reminder to establish that the cyclopes were outside of society and thus justify his assault against them, and also to violently reduce their agency, denying that Polyphemus had ever rejected society at all. Odysseus then brutally maims Polyphemus when the cyclops refuses to do as he is ordered.
Effectively, he arrived at a stranger’s home, asked for something that the stranger's culture would not provide, and enacted brutal violence upon the stranger for not complying.
Homer depicts Odysseus as a hero nevertheless, and, in doing so, condones the violence Odysseus enacts on the cyclops. He does this because both he and Odysseus stand to gain from the vanquishing of those who are opposed to society.