the door of the slaughterhouse, my comrades forgot me and so left me behind in the Cyclops' enormous den. It is a house of gore and bloody feasting, deep, and dark, and huge; its master towers aloft, and strikes the stars on high (ye gods, remove from the earth a plague like 5 this!), whom no eye rests on with pleasure, no tongue dare accost. The flesh of wretched men and their black blood are the food he feeds on. These eyes saw, when two bodies from our company, caught by his huge hand, as he threw back his head in the midst of the den, were 10 being brained against the rock, and the floor was plashed and swimming with blood—they saw, when he was crunching their limbs, dripping with black gore, and the warm joints were quivering under his teeth. He did it, but not unpunished. Ulysses was not the man to brook 15 a deed like this; the brain of Ithaca was not wanting to itself when the need was so great. For soon as, gorged with his food and buried in wine, he bent and dropped his neck, and lay all along the den in unmeasured length, belching out gore in his sleep, and gobbets mixed with 20 bloody wine; then we, having made our prayer to the great gods and drawn our places by lot, surround him on all sides as one man, and with a sharp weapon bore out his eye, that vast eye, which used to lie single and sunk under his grim brow,[1] and thus at last take triumphant 25 vengeance for our comrades' shades. But fly, unhappy men, fly, and tear your cable from the shore. For hideous and huge as is Polyphemus, folding in his den his woolly flocks and pressing their udders, as hideous and huge are a hundred others that dwell everywhere along this coast, 30 monster Cyclops, and stalk over the tall mountains. It is now the third moon, whose horns are filling out with light, that I am dragging along my life in the woods; among the lonely lairs where wild beasts dwell, and looking forth on the huge Cyclops as they stalk from rock to 35]
- ↑ Another line omitted in the translation:—"huge as Greek shield or sun-god's torch."—[E. S. S.
