The Odyssey Polyphemus Comic

Nobody—that’s my name. Nobody—
so my mother and father call me, all my friends.

Cunning is Odysseus’s greatest trait and it serves him well throughout the poem, perhaps nowhere more famously than in his triumph over the Cyclops, Polyphemus. Having introduced himself as “Nobody,” Odysseus subdues the giant with wine and blinds him by piercing his one large eye with a pointed stake. Polyphemus then calls out to his kin for help, saying that “Nobody, friends…Nobody’s killing me now by fraud and not by force!” The other Cyclopes thus assume that he is fine and ignore his pleas for help, allowing Odysseus and his men ultimately to escape.

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