Polyphemus is the one-eyed giant who traps Odysseus in his cave and pays for it with his sight. He is also a son of Poseidon, which is the detail that ruins everything. The encounter fills Book 9, and it is the most famous thing in the poem for a plain reason: it is the moment cunning beats brute strength, and the moment Odysseus earns the sea-god's wrath that will hold him from home for ten more years.
In Book 9, Odysseus and twelve men wander into the cave of Polyphemus, a giant who shuts them in and devours several of them. Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk, tells him his name is “Nobody,” and drives a fire-hardened olive stake into his single eye. When the blinded giant howls that “Nobody” is hurting him, no neighbour comes — and the survivors slip out clinging beneath his rams.
Odysseus is curious, and curiosity leads him in. He takes a scouting party up to a cave in the hills, the home of a herdsman he has not yet met. The herdsman is Polyphemus, tall as a crag. When the giant comes home and rolls a boulder across the mouth of the cave, the door of the world closes behind them. There is no leaving by force; all of them together could not shift that stone.
Polyphemus has no use for the laws of hospitality that hold the rest of the poem's world together. He snatches up two of the men and eats them, then two more, and pens the survivors like livestock against his next hunger. The cave stops being a cave. It becomes the dark belly of the world, the place a hero goes down into and must find his own way back out of.
Odysseus answers the monster with patience instead of muscle. He offers him strong, unwatered wine until the giant topples into sleep, then has his men heat the tip of a great olive stake in the embers and drive it, turning like a drill, into the lidless eye. At dawn the blinded Cyclops lets his flock out to graze and runs his hands along each woolly back, certain the men will try to ride out over the top. He never thinks to feel underneath. Lashed beneath the bellies of the rams, they pass out into the light.
Earlier, when the Cyclops demanded his name, Odysseus had given him one: Nobody. Outis, in the Greek. So when the blinded giant roars into the night that Nobody is killing him, the other Cyclopes call back that if nobody is using force on him, his pain must be a sickness sent by the gods — and they go back to sleep. One small pun turns his whole tribe into accomplices of their own indifference.
This is mētis: the shrewd, shape-shifting intelligence that is Odysseus's real weapon, the gift the poem prizes far above strength. He does not beat the dark by being bigger than it. He beats it by becoming no one, slipping through, and surfacing on the far side. To get out of the cave alive, he first has to disappear.
Polyphemus is Poseidon's son. In blinding him, Odysseus has wounded the sea-god through his child, though he does not yet feel the cost. And then he cannot help himself. Pulling away from the shore, safe at the oars, he turns and shouts his real name across the water so the giant will know exactly who undid him. The man who survived by being Nobody undoes himself the instant he insists on being Someone.
That boast is the giant's last weapon, and he uses it. Polyphemus lifts his hands to his father and prays that this Odysseus, son of Laertes, never reach home — or reach it late and broken, his ship gone and his men with it. Poseidon hears. Every storm after this, every wasted year, runs back to that one flush of pride. The cleverest man alive cannot outwit the god he has insulted. He can only outlast him.
Why did Odysseus say his name was Nobody?
So the trap would close on the Cyclops himself. When the blinded giant cried that “Nobody” was attacking him, his neighbours assumed no one was — and left him to suffer alone, letting Odysseus's men escape.
How did Odysseus escape the Cyclops?
He got Polyphemus drunk, blinded his single eye with a sharpened, fire-hardened olive stake while he slept, then tied himself and his men beneath the giant's rams. As the blind Cyclops let the flock out and felt their backs, the men passed out under their bellies undetected.
Why is Poseidon angry at Odysseus?
Because Odysseus blinded Poseidon's son Polyphemus and then boasted his true name, letting the Cyclops curse him by name to his father. Poseidon answered that prayer with storms, delay, and the loss of all Odysseus's companions.