The One Who Sees in Circles

Ilinca Petran
Field Correspondent, The Old Continent

Fieldnotes — the slopes above Mount Etna, high summer

The word itself gives something away before the story does. Kyklops — circle-eyed. Not blind, not monstrous by accident, but built that way from the start, as though the single eye were the whole point of the creature rather than an afterthought of horror. I have been turning that over for a fortnight now, walking the goat-tracks above Etna and, before that, standing under the walls at Mycenae, trying to work out which Cyclops the Greeks actually believed in — because there were at least two, and they do not agree with each other.

Hesiod's Cyclopes are old and few: Brontes, Steropes, Arges — Thunder, Lightning, Flash — sons of Uranus and Gaia, forge-workers who armed Zeus with his bolt and then vanish from the story, their labour done. These are smiths, craftsmen of the deep earth, closer kin to the Titans than to any shepherd. But the Cyclopes most people carry with them are Homer's: a whole race of them, lawless and scattered across the wild coast of Sicily, each one keeping his own cave and his own flock, answering to no assembly, no law, no god but appetite. Polyphemus, blinded by Odysseus with a fire-sharpened stake, is the one who survives in memory — not a craftsman at all, but a herdsman living exactly the kind of solitary upland life the design on this shirt tries to gesture toward: a man alone on a mountain with his sheep and his cheese-racks, and no neighbour for miles.

What struck me, sitting above the lava fields with the shepherds' bells sounding faint below, is how much of this pastoral Cyclops belongs to real mountain country — Sicily, and later Crete, both places where transhumant herding is ancient and still, in pockets, ongoing. The giants are outsized versions of the men who actually lived there: solitary, competent with animals, indifferent to the customs of the cities below. Folklore does this constantly, taking the isolation of a real life and swelling it into monstrosity.

Then there is the stranger footnote, the one I cannot leave alone once I have read it. The palaeontologist Othenio Abel proposed, early in the last century, that the skulls of dwarf elephants — extinct animals whose remains turn up in caves across Sicily and Crete — carry a single great cavity in the centre of the face, the nasal opening, large enough and central enough to read, at a glance and in poor light, as one vast eye socket. Whether the ancient Greeks who found these skulls in mountain caves actually built the Cyclops from them, nobody can say with certainty; the theory is elegant rather than proven, and I would not swear to it round a fire. But standing in a limestone cave above the tree line, looking at a fossil eye socket the size of a fist, it is not hard to believe a shepherd might once have crawled in out of the rain and come out with a story.

The walls at Mycenae add a third strand, unrelated to shepherding but too good to leave out: stones so immense that later Greeks, looking at what their own ancestors had built, decided ordinary men could never have lifted them, and credited the masonry to the Cyclopes instead — a labour, this time, back with the smiths and builders, not the solitary herdsman at all. Three different Cyclopes, then, none of them quite reconciled: forge-worker, mountain shepherd, wall-raiser. I have stopped trying to settle which came first. The mountain keeps all three.

Ilinca Petran is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Old Continent. Carpathian thresholds: doorways, graves, and the moments in the year when the two are said to be less distinct. She follows transhumance routes and the beliefs that travel with them, and is dry about the vampire question.