Recently in his English class my son had to read the Odyssey (well, an abridged version), which I read along with him. I hadn’t read it since college. It’s quite the rip-roaring yarn. No wonder Homer is enjoying his 130,443rd straight week on bestseller lists everywhere.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been reading a really cool book by Matt Kaplan, called Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters. It explains a lot of the history behind our ongoing belief in mythical creatures.
The Cyclops is one such creature. It’s the name given by the ancient Greeks (and later, the Romans) to a primordial race of giants with one eye in the center of their forehead. As you may recall, in Homer’s story, Odysseus blinds a Cyclops and effects an escape from its cave when he and his men strap themselves to the underbellies of sheep.
According to Kaplan, the Greeks’ belief in the Cyclops may have emerged when they found fossils that belonged to relatives of modern elephants, which paleontologists believe once roamed the islands of the Mediterranean. The Greeks wouldn’t have been familiar with elephants, so the large nasal cavity where the trunk once attached might have looked to them like a giant eye socket.