Enter the Cyclops with retinue by Eisodos A.
Cyclops
Give way, make way! What is going on here? What means this slackness? Why this Bacchic holiday? Here is no Dionysus,
[205]
no bronze castanets, no rattle of drums. How fare my new-born lambs in the cave? Are they at the teat and running to their mothers' sides? The milk for cheeses—has it been put in rush buckets?
[210]
What say you? This club will soon make someone cry. Look up, not down!
Chorus-Leader
looking up at Polyphemus
There! My head is turned up toward Zeus himself and the stars, and I see Orion!
Cyclops
Is my dinner well prepared?
Chorus-Leader
[215]
It is: just be sure your gullet is ready.
Cyclops
Are the mixing-bowls filled with milk as well?
Chorus-Leader
So much that you can drink an entire storage-jar if you like.
Cyclops
Cows' milk or sheep's or a mixture of both?
Chorus-Leader
Whatever you like. Just don't swallow me down.
Cyclops
[220]
I wouldn't think of it: you would be the death of me with your dance-steps, leaping around in the middle of my belly.
He spies Odysseus and his men.
Hey! What is this crowd I see near my cave? Have some pirates or robbers landed here? I do see lambs here from my cave,
[225]
their bodies bound with twisted willow-withes, and my cheese-buckets all in disarray, and an old man with his bald head swollen with blows.1
Silenus
Oh! Oh! Wretched me! What a fever I have got from being beaten up!
Cyclops
By whom? Who has been pummeling your head, old man?
Silenus
[230]
These men, because I would not let them take your property.
Cyclops
Did they not know that I am a god and descended from gods?
Silenus
I told them so, but they went on plundering your possessions, and, what is more, they started in on the cheese, though I tried to stop them, and began to carry off the sheep. And they said that they would collar you
[235]
like a dangerous dog and right before your very eye pull out your guts by force, flay your back nicely with a whip, then bind you hand and foot and throw you onto the rowing-benches of their ship and sell you to someone
[240]
to pry up rocks with or throw you into a mill.
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1 We must suppose that the Cyclops here misdiagnoses the effect of the wine on Silenus, who then improvises his story to agree with Polyphemus' mistake.
Euripides. Euripides, with an English translation by David Kovacs. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. forthcoming.
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