As regards Hypereia I would repeat that all the names of places in Sicily with one partial exception are fictitious, even Trinacria, which Thucydides tells us was the most ancient name of Sicily, becoming "the Thrinacian," or "three-pointed," island; whereas as soon as we are outside Sicily the names are real. This affords ground for thinking that the writer was drawing real people as well as real places, and travestying them under flimsy disguises that she knew her audience would see through. Once only is the mask dropped for a moment, when Ulysses says that he had just come from Sicania (xxiv. 307), but this does not count, for Ulysses is supposed to be lying.
The name Cyclopes, for example, or "round faces"—for there is nothing in the word to show that it means anything else than this, and I see from Liddell & Scott that Parmenides calls the moon Cyclops—is merely an author's nick name. If μήλωψ means "apple-faced," κύκλωψ should mean "circle-faced." As there is nothing in the word, so neither is there in the Odyssey, to suggest that the Cyclopes were a people with only one round eye in the middle of their foreheads. Such a marked feature does not go without saying,[2] and that it did not go with the earliest Greek artists appears from the fact that they always gave Polyphemus two eyes. It is not till Roman times that he becomes monophthalmic, and the Odyssey gives him eyebrows in the plural (ix. 389), which involve eyes in the plural also. True, the writer only blinds one eye, but she could trust to the sympathetic inflammation which so serious an injury would excite in the other eye, and would consider that she had sufficiently blinded both by roasting one of them. One eye alone was blinded, not because Polyphemus had not got two, but because his pole had not got two prongs, and the writer saw neither how to get a bifurcated instrument into the cave, nor how to wield it now that so many of the men had been eaten.
"Cyclopes," therefore, we may be sure, means nothing more than "moon-faced." The name Polyphemus is found as that of a hero in the Iliad, and is perhaps a pseudonym for the local giant (if there was one) taken from that poem. "Whatever his name may have been, and whether he was a pre-Odyssean giant, or whether the writer of the Odyssey called him into being, he exists now under the name of Conturràno. I have sometimes wondered whether this name may have any connection with the Greek words κόντος and οὐρανός, and may indicate that the giant was so tall as to be able to knock a hole in the sky with his staff. Should this be so, his name, as likely as not was Conturràno, or something near it, in the days of the Odyssey, and it was with the κόντος commemorated in his own name that Ulysses blinded him. The giant has grown greatly since the Odyssey was written, and large as the grotta di Polifemo is, he could never get inside it; for he rests his feet on the plain while he props his stomach on the top of Mt. Eryx, and bending forward plunges his huge hands into the sea between Bonagia and Cofàno, to catch tunnies. When disturbed he tears great rocks from the top of Mt. Eryx, and dashes them at all who interrupt him.
To repeat and to sum up, for I will argue this point no further; I take the Cyclopes to be the conquered remnant of the old Sican inhabitants of Mt. Eryx. They owe their gigantic stature to the huge size of the stones with which the walls of their city on Mt. Eryx were built. These stones show few or no signs of having been worked with a tool of hardened bronze or iron, save in so far as the Phœnicians may have trimmed them here and there when they rebuilt the walls, in part, de novo, with stones some of which bear quarry-men's marks in Phœnician characters.[3] The old Sican work, a good deal of which has been allowed to stand, belongs to the true megalithic age, when it was cheaper to carry than to cut; later generations, failing to consider the revolution which the introduction of improved methods of cutting had effected, argued that the men who built with such large stones must have been large men, whereas in reality they were only economical men.
As soon as it became cheaper to cut than to carry, the huge unwieldy blocks that we see at Eryx, at Cefalù, and at Segni, Arpino, Allatri, and many another city in Southern Italy, became obsolete, but it was still long before all irregularity in the courses was abandoned for that perfect regularity which we find at Syracuse, Selinunte, the temple of Segesta, and nearly all the Greek and Roman architecture of historic times. Indeed I know many buildings as late as the tenth century after Christ, in which the courses are far from regular; nevertheless the tendency, almost immediately after cutting had become cheaper, was towards greater regularity of courses and the use of smaller stones, until there arose another megalithicism, of a kind diametrically opposed to that of the earlier builders—I mean the megalithicism of display.
H. FESTING JONES, ESQ. (height 6 ft. 2 in.) IN FLUTE OF COLUMN AT SELINUNTE.