Seoul Hero

Euripides’ Cyclops is unique among the works of classical literature that have come down to us in that it is the only surviving “satyr play.” With rough humour, violence, a memory of a bisexual orgy, an audacious line about a gangbang, and a hilarious send-up of a homoerotic encounter between two very unsexy middle aged “men,” it is also a play that nevertheless reveals a typically contemplative Euripides at work, probingly exploring the nature of contemporary religion and metaphysics.

First, what is a satyr play? Satyr plays, according to Rutherford, the author of the notes in “Euripides: Heracles and Other Plays,” translated by John Davie, were customarily performed, alongside a playwright’s chosen three tragedies, at a festival called the “Great Dionysia.” They most likely were drawn from mythological material, although their plots were often “burlesqued.” Rutherford comments: “Although the satyr-play may be lighter in tone and shorter than a tragedy, the form still merited respect: after all, it was in the most obvious sense a tribute to the god of drama, Dionysus himself, the master of the satyrs.” The chorus of satyr plays, unlike regular tragedies, were thought of as comprising a group of satyrs.

When reading this satyr play, Rutherford reminds us that we need to remember that

“the generic context of satyric drama–a drama celebrating drink, sex, self-indulgent hedonism–neutralizes moral qualms which we would feel in other contexts, and which indeed we do feel in parallel scenes in other Euripidean dramas.”

Cyclops itself, as Rutherford notes, is a satire (he uses the word “parody”) of the famous scene in Homer’s Odyssey wherein Odysseus blinds the monster Cyclops in his one eye. The story is well-known, and so I will procede straight to Euripides’ version of events. After having been separated from Dionysus by a storm, Silenus, the father of the satyrs, and the rest of the satyrs are stuck on Mount Etna in Sicily, where they serve their master, one from the race of Cyclopes (plural). The Cyclops, like the rest of his brethren, presumably, has only one eye. He is a sort of cowboy, a shepherd, rather than a farmer, living on sheep, milk, and cows–and, when he can get them, people. The first word of the play, spoken by Silenus in a sort of prayer, is the vocative form of “Bromius,” a cultic title of Dionysus meaning “the roaring one.” Dionysus, curiously, is not present in the body in this play, which also lacks the deus ex machina device that we saw in each of the preceding Euripidean plays.

When the shipwrecked Odysseus arrives at the Cyclops’ ranch, he interrupts Silenus’s nostalgic fantasies, in which the latter remembers the time when he, together with the nymphs and “Bacchants” (usually female followers of the deity), chased after Aphrodite while yelling their heads off excitedly. The Greek carries with him a marvelous wineskin that always has more wine to pour, which is critical to the events of the plot and the meaning of the play, as a whole. After giving some wine to the chorus of satyrs, and to Silenus, the conqueror of Troy is asked a question that would be right out in tragedy: “Once you had caught [Helen], didn’t you all take turns in banging her, since having many partners was what she enjoyed?” This audacious line is of a piece with the nature of the genre.

After giving wine to Silenus, who agrees to help Odysseus, the latter and his men are set upon by the Cyclops and betrayed by Silenus, who in this play comes across as a clever fool. Cyclops promptly kills two Greeks and eats them for supper. It’s at that point that Odysseus comes up with the idea of getting the Cyclops drunk in order to incapacitate him. While drunk, the Cyclops takes a sudden fancy for the elderly Silenus, asking him, “What should we do, Silenus? Do you think we should stay?” Silenus encourages the Cylops to refrain from calling the other Cyclopes over to share the wine, and the latter ends up calling the satyr his “Ganymede,” a beautiful boy who serviced Zeus at the table and in bed: “Ganymede here will give me a nicer time than the Graces if I take him to bed. Boys somehow give me greater pleasure than females.” The prospect of being the monster’s plaything sobers up the drunk father of the satyrs immediately, in what must have had the ancient Greek audience of (mostly) experienced men rolling with laughter. (Greek sexuality actively encouraged relations between middle-aged men and teenage boys, as seen, for instance, in Plato’s Lysis and the Symposium, but frowned on homosexual relations between older men.) Meanwhile, Odysseus gets the Cyclops even more drunk, until he falls asleep, at which point the “cunning” character, in what can only be called a Freudian move, thrusts a burning branch into the Cyclops’ one eye, blinding him before making his triumphant escape, along with the chorus, who say that they “will become shipmates of Odysseus here and give our service to Bacchus for evermore.”

As might be expected of a Eurpidean play submitted at the festival of Dionysus, Cyclops is not empty of religious and metaphysical content. Euripides’ efforts in this regard are surprisingly subtle. Unlike the preceding Eurpidean plays I have discussed, no Olympian deity makes an appearance here. Rutherford notes that Dionysus is conspicuous by his absence. Indeed, Bacchus, as he is usually called in this play, is invoked, under his cultic name of “Bromius,” (”roarer”) by the divine Silenus in the very first word of the play, but does not appear in bodily form.

The god Dionysus Bacchus in many ways stands apart from the other Olympian deities. For one thing, he is uniquely vulnerable to violence. As a long-ago post on my old blog showed, “ Orpheos Bakkikos” suffered the indignity of crucifixion, like Jesus. Also like Jesus, he is associated with wine (cf. the the story of the miracle of new wine, and the versions of the story of the Last Supper). What is somewhat astonishing in this play is that Euripides shows the divine satyr followers of Dionysus being subject to a powerful, but very ordinary Cyclops.

It is true that the Cyclops is called the son of Poseidon, but he works no magic, nor does he care about the worship of his father. In fact, the Cyclops bears striking resemblances to the Fool so well-known from the wisdom literature of the Bible: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘there is no God’.” The Cyclops, who cares not a whiff for conventional religion, speaks in naturalistic terms about how “the Earth from necessity, whether she wills it or not, brings for the grass to keep my flock fat. I sacrifice to no one except myself, never to the gods, but to the greatest divinity there is, this stomach. Drinking and eating every day, and avoiding all pain to oneself–this is Zeus in the eyes of sensible men.” He also says that “Wealth…is what the wise think of as divine; everything else is idle chatter and high-sounding phrases.” Indeed, while other men cower in fear of Zeus or the North Wind, the Cyclops lights up his fire (with echoes of Prometheus!) in his cave and eats roast mutton. Commenting on this speech by the Cyclops, Rutherford notes that he “lectures Odysseus on human life in the manner of a fifth-century intellectual.” As we saw in the previous post on Helen, rationalizing divinity away was a characteristic of fifth century Athenian intellectuals. The rationalizing impetus within Euripides’ works has been noted by others, notwithstanding his lipservice to popular religion by way of his god-from-the-machine moments at the end of several of his works. Yet I think that it would be a mistake to think that Euripides was an atheist, or that the Cyclops speaks entirely for him (although the irony of the overlap between their views should be noted).

That is where we return to the subject of Dionysus and wine. When Odysseus is getting Silenus drunk, the latter is deleriously happy. The Cyclops walks in, and promptly announces “There’s no Dionysus here,” perhaps as an atheist might to the consernation of a group of Christians who believe “that where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am.” Later, however, when Odysseus is getting the Cyclops drunk, he refers to the wine by the term “Bacchus,” which, according to Rutherford, was a “common figure of speech….But here, the conflation [of wine and the god] is treated with comic literal-mindedness.” I think Rutherford misses a little bit; as I read this passage, I hear echoes of the Eucharist, actually, but more importantly I also see a rationalizing, but spiritually-minded Euripides at work in what purports to be merely a funny exchange. The spirit of Dionysus lives in the delight of those who are drunk with Bacchus:

Odysseus: Cyclops, I’m well-acquainted with this Bacchus I gave you to drink.
Cyclops: Who is Bacchus? Do people worship him as a god?
Odysseus: In bringing joy to men’s hearts, he has no equal.
Cyclops: Well, I certainly enjoy belching him out.
Odysseus: That is the god’s nature; he harms nobody at all.
Cyclops: But a god like him, how can he be happy living in a wineskin?
Odysseus: He accomodates himself to wherever he is put.
Cyclops: Gods shouldn’t wear animal skins.

One of the interesting features of this dialogue and the play is that it is a man, Odysseus, who uses a god to get what he wants, which will eventually include returning the satyrs from their shepherd ogre to where they can worship Bacchus in peace (one sees hints of a history of religion there, but that is beyond the scope of this post). In that regard, Odysseus has greater power than any god in the play, something that ought to remind us of Helen, where the human Theonoe’s decision tips the balance between the bickering goddesses of Olympus.

As I read Euripides, his characters often show an intellectual and moral awareness that the Olympian gods of myth are not true deities, and this awareness is not obliterated by the god-from-the-machine moments that often end the plays. Yet despite this, the salvific deus ex machina moments in several plays can be inferred as answers to the prayers of the suppliant protagonists, while the role of Providence in saving the protagonists is not inconsiderable, especially when one bears in mind that the beginning of their delivery usually occurs at the altar or on some kind of sacred space (Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion, and Helen). So, here, too, I think that Euripides does not discount the spiritual side of life, choosing to recognize the spirit of Bacchus among those who celebrate with wine, a particularly appropriate lesson for a play performed at a festival dedicated to the god of wine and revelry. Ironically–for Euripides is full of ironies–it is the man Odysseus, as the only non-drinker of the play, who effects any positive action, which he does with his bottomless wineskin.

Just like Odysseus’ Bacchus, so, too, with Euripides, there is something for everyone, whether ancient or modern, atheist or believer. Devout Olympian believers get to (usually) see their gods on stage, responding to prayers; on another level, intellectuals get to see devastating moral and logical critiques of the popular notions of divinity (as best shown in Heracles), together with rationalizations that close the need for gods of the gaps. This all takes place in a context where Providence usually works things out for the best for at least the main characters, thanks to human action, cleverness, or virtue. In the Western literary canon, Euripides is truly a man for all seasons, the Shakespeare of the ancient world.

Note: This post finishes my posts on the plays in the Penguin Davie volume that I have been using. Fortunately, I have another book, but there are only a couple of Euripidean plays in it. In the mean time, I hope that if you’ve made it this far you will register for the site, or email me, and leave a comment.