Odysseus Escaping Under the Ram

The black-figure scene shows the escape trick from the Cyclops' cave: a huge ram strides along, and clinging beneath its belly is a man — Odysseus, riding out of the cave under the blind giant's own flock.

Vase painters loved this scene because it puts the whole trick in one image; the viewer, like Polyphemus, has to look twice to spot the man under the animal. This vase is attributed to the Sappho Painter, an Athenian workshop artist active around 500 BC.

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 Sappho Painter was an Athenian vase painter of the late sixth and early fifth century BC, named by scholars after a vase showing the poet Sappho. In black-figure work, figures are painted in dark silhouette and details scratched through to the red clay.