About the work
Satyr play by Euripides and the only complete surviving example of this ancient dramatic genre. Its date is uncertain: scholarship places it anywhere between roughly 424 and 408 BC, with more recent studies favouring a date around 408 BC.
Plot
Following the plot of Homer's 'Odyssey', Odysseus and his companions land in Sicily, where the satyr Silenus and his sons live as slaves of the man-eating Cyclops Polyphemus. Odysseus gets Polyphemus drunk on wine and blinds him in his sleep with a burning stake so that he and his men can escape.
Cultural significance
As the only satyr play to survive in full, 'Cyclops' offers the sole direct glimpse of a genre that once concluded every tragic tetralogy, recasting myth in comic, bawdy form.