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31-08-2015, 09:15

Art, music, and literature

As the unrequited lover, Polyphemus became a common character, first of Greco-Roman pastoral (poem or play about rural life) and then of European pastoral in all its forms. Galatea and Polyphemus also became stock figures in Greco-Roman art. The one-eyed simpleton musician was always shown playing and singing to the sea nymph. The pair came to represent a suitable subject for the mosaic floors and painted walls of villas built by the wealthy, who enjoyed expressing their “sophistication” with decorative scenes from the “simple,” pastoral world of ordinary, unsophisticated country men and women.

Whereas Homer’s Odysseus traveled through imaginary, fantastical lands, later writers and painters often made the island of Sicily, in Italy, the setting of the pastoral world in which Polyphemus lived.

In the fifth century BCE, Athenian playwright Euripides wrote a play called Cyclops, which has survived, but the

Above: Acis and Galatea Hide from the Gaze of Polyphemus,

Painted by Francois Perrier (c. 1594-1649). The story of the brutish Cyclops and the beautiful young sea nymph demonstrated the dangerous consequences of unrequited love.


Works of other dramatists who wrote comedies on the same topic have been lost. From the 16th century CE onward, dramatists found the foolish love of Polyphemus a good theme for comic theater, combining the absurd, but rather clever, character of Euripides’ comic play with the sadly foolish Cyclops, the unrequited lover, of the Greek and Roman pastoral poets.

Composers of opera, again from the 16th century onward, also found the theme of Polyphemus’s love particularly appealing. Well-known works include Lully’s Acis et Galatee, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, and Haydn’s Aci e Galatea. There are also numerous works from the 19th and 20th centuries. The 18th century saw a number of ballets on the Acis and Galatea theme. In about 1888 a great French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, created a bronze statue depicting the giant burying his rival Acis under the mountain.

The term Cyclopean was used by Greeks to describe the great fortification walls of palaces from the Mycenaean age, such as those at Tiryns and Mycenae. The walls were constructed from enormous, mostly pentagonal to octagonal blocks of stone, which seemed too massive to have been made and moved by human effort. According to legend, such palaces were constructed by the Cyclopes in prehistoric times. Today we still use the term to describe anything massive or gigantic.

Anthony Bulloch

Bibliography

Bulfinch, Thomas. Bulfmch’s Mythology. New York: Barnes &

Noble, 2006.

Hesiod, and M. L. West, trans. Theogony and Works and Days. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Homer, and Robert Fagles, trans. The Odyssey. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Howatson, M. C. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

See also: Galatea; Odysseus.



 

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