Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Theocritus sings a Sicilian Polyphemus still young, not yet the Homeric cannibal. He loves the sea-nymph Galatea and wastes with desire. Sitting on a high rock by the sea, he cures love with song—as the poet’s medicine for his friend Nicias. Polyphemus boasts of his thousand sheep, his milk and cheese, his garden; he calls Galatea from the water, offers to burn his single eye for her, invites her to share his cave, and scolds his mother for not pleading his case. He knows he is ugly—shaggy, one-eyed—yet insists a rich rustic can out-give handsome rivals. Galatea never answers in *Idyll* 11; the comedy and pathos are the Cyclops talking himself toward endurance. *Idyll* 6 adds a teasing dialogue: Galatea pelts his flock and dog; he pretends indifference. Nowhere here does Acis appear, nor the crushing rock of Ovid. Theocritus thus preserves a **Greek** Polyphemus of unrequited pastoral love—ancestor of the later romantic triangle but complete in itself as bucolic consolation: song soothes what the nymph will not grant.