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CYCLOPS
ANDREW GAMBELL
The theatre of ancient Greece flourished between 550 and 220 BC. The theatre’s home was in the political and social heart of Greece, Athens. The three main genres of the theatre were Tragedy, Comedy and Satyr. Satyr theatre was a hybrid blend between tragedy and comedy. It has since been compared to the modern day burlesque style. What these plays featured in common was their chorus of ‘satyrs’ (A group of male companions of Pan and Dionysus) and their main themes were of drinking, sex and pranks. There was also lots of racy humour involved. They were usually performed at the end of a festival to lighten the mood of the audience after the tragedies. They were also intentionally half as long as tragedies to not bore the audience.

Although there are many fragments of these plays intact today, the only satyr play to remain intact in its entirety is ‘Cyclops’ written by Euripides. It’s essentially a comic-burlesque style parody of Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’. The protagonist ‘Odysseus’ and his crew have lost their way on their voyage home from the Trojan War. After stopping for food in Sicily at Mount Aetna, they meet the Satyrs and their father Silenus who have been enslaved by a Cyclops who is based on the character Polyphemus from the Odyssey. The satyrs and their father Silenus are not based on any characters from the famous tale and serve as the main source of comedy in the play because of their drunk and cowardly behaviour. Odysseus trades some food for wine with Silenus. After the Cyclops arrives, Silenus accuses Odysseus of stealing the food. One of the satyrs tells the Cyclops the truth and in the struggle that follows, the Cyclops takes Odysseus’s crew into his cave and eats them. After Odysseus escapes, he vows he will get his vengeance on the Cyclops by getting him drunk and then poking out his eye with a hot poker. Silenus and Cyclops drink wine together and after a while Cyclops becomes so drunk he mistakes Silenus for a beautiful prince and tries to take him to his cave to have sex with him. Thanks to the Satyrs cowardliness, Odysseus can’t go on with the next phase of his plan, so he chooses to instead elect the remaining members of his crew to help him burn out the Cyclops eye. Him and his crew then escape.

Satyr plays are often taken from epic or mythological stories, as Cyclops was. It also follows the tradition of having a satyric chorus that is Silenus's children in the play. It also includes the right does of humour to stop the play from being a tragedy because of the elements of violence in most of the plays of Greece. It's also a historically important play as it is the only satyr play in full.