The Cyclopes

Three smiths with one eye each

The first Cyclopes appear in the work of Hesiod, an early Greek poet who told how the gods were born. He is exact about them. They are three sons of the goddess Gaia and the god Uranus, and their names are Brontes, Steropes and Arges. Each has one round eye in the middle of his forehead. They are strong, and they are skilled craftsmen. They make the thunder and the thunderbolt for the god Zeus. With these weapons Zeus can establish his rule after the war against the Titans.

Gifts for three gods

Apollodorus, who wrote a handbook of the Greek myths called the Library, keeps their names and their single eye. He gives them more to make. Zeus frees the Cyclopes from Tartarus, where they had been imprisoned. In return they give him thunder, lightning and the thunderbolt. They give the god Poseidon a trident and the god Hades a helmet.

In this account the Cyclopes are craftsmen of the gods inside a family story. They are brothers of the Titans and of the Hundred-Handers. One generation of gods locks them away, and the next sets them free. Their work changes who rules the world.

Later in the same account, Zeus strikes down Asclepius with the thunderbolt the Cyclopes made. The god Apollo then kills them in revenge. That revenge makes sense only if the makers still answer for the weapon. It belongs to the story of three named beings, and not to a whole race of one-eyed shepherds.

The people Odysseus meets

The Odyssey, Homer’s poem about the hero Odysseus and his journey home, uses the same name for something else. Its Cyclopes live in a land the poem does not name. They do not farm, they hold no assemblies and they have no ships. Each man rules his own household. Grain, vines and grass grow there without any work. The poem treats their lack of shared law as just as important as their strength.

Polyphemus is one member of this people. Homer makes him the son of Poseidon and of Thoosa, a nymph, or minor goddess. His meeting with Odysseus fills most of Book 9 of the poem. He has the single eye that people picture when they think of a Cyclops. But his parents are not those of Brontes, Steropes and Arges. The Odyssey never presents his people as the workshop that armed Zeus.

The old myths do not force these stories to merge. Because the two groups share a name and a single eye, artists and later storytellers could bring them together. The texts still give them different parents, homes and work. Keeping them apart makes a third group easier to see.

The builders of Tiryns and Mycenae

In the Argolid, the region around Nafplio, the Cyclopes are builders. Apollodorus says that Proetus came back from Lycia and took over Tiryns, which the Cyclopes had walled for him. The ancient geographer Strabo adds a number and an origin. Seven Cyclopes came from Lycia, earned their living by their craft and built the walls of Tiryns. People there called them Bellyhands, because their skill fed them.

Pausanias, a Greek traveller who wrote a guide to Greece, saw these walls as the work of more than human strength. At Mycenae he says the Cyclopes built parts of the wall, including the Lion Gate. At Tiryns he describes rough stones so large that a team could not move even the smallest, with smaller stones packed into the gaps.

The builders belong to myth, but the walls still stand. Most of the surviving walls at Tiryns date to the thirteenth century BC. It describes a circuit about 750 metres long, with walls up to 8 metres thick and 13 metres high. Archaeologists still call such huge blocks Cyclopean masonry, as a comparison and not as a record of who built them.

A name for overwhelming force

Mycenae and Tiryns give the name its firmest ground in Greece. Nobody can trace a one-eyed race in the Bronze Age, the period these walls come from. Later Greeks used the Cyclopes to explain walls so large that they seemed to need an extraordinary builder.

The three traditions share an idea even where their stories differ. A thunderbolt, a lonely cave and a fortress wall each put ordinary human power under pressure. Hesiod’s Cyclopes master the craft of the gods. Homer’s Cyclopes live outside any shared law. The builders of the Argolid move stones too large for human hands.

Treating them as one family loses these differences. Greek myth gives the name again and again to overwhelming force. Sometimes that force works in a forge, sometimes a traveller has to face it, and sometimes it is set into the walls above the Argolid plain.