The Blinding of Polyphemus (Eleusis Amphora)

On the neck of this huge storage jar, Odysseus and two companions drive a long pole into the eye of Polyphemus. The giant sits at the right, still holding the cup of wine that put him to sleep. The painter singled out Odysseus by painting his body in a lighter color than his men.

This is one of the oldest surviving pictures of any scene from Homer, made barely a century after the poems took shape. The jar was found in 1954 in a cemetery at Eleusis, where it had been reused as a coffin for a child. Its bold, experimental style marks the moment Greek painters first tried to tell epic stories on pots.

The Odyssey begins after the Trojan War is over. Odysseus — the Romans later called him Ulysses — has spent ten years fighting at Troy, and it will take him ten more to get home to the island of Ithaca, where he is king. Homer's poem actually opens in the middle of that journey; these scenes follow the trip in the order Odysseus lived it.

The voyage goes wrong almost immediately. His twelve ships raid the Cicones, a people allied with Troy, and lose men. A storm then drives the fleet to the land of the Lotus-eaters, where anyone who tastes the sweet lotus fruit forgets home entirely; Odysseus has to drag his own men back to the ships by force. Then, scouting an unknown coast with twelve companions, he walks into a huge cave stocked with cheeses and lambs. It belongs to Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant — a Cyclops, and a son of the sea god Poseidon.

The giant rolls a boulder across the entrance and starts eating the crew, two at a time. Odysseus thinks instead of fighting: kill the giant and they are sealed in the cave forever. So he gives Polyphemus strong wine, tells him his name is “Nobody,” and when the giant passes out, drives a sharpened, fire-heated stake into his single eye. When Polyphemus screams that “Nobody is hurting me,” the other Cyclopes shrug and go home.

The unknown artist is called the Polyphemus Painter after this very vase. He worked in the Proto-Attic style of the seventh century BC, when painters around Athens abandoned pure pattern and began drawing large mythological figures.