613'I am from Ithaca, my homeland, a companion of unlucky Ulysses, Achaemenides by name, and I set out for Troy because my father Adamastus was poor — and would that I had stayed in that fortune! 616Here my comrades, as they fled in fear from the cruel threshold, forgot me and left me behind in the Cyclops' vast cave. 618It is a house of gore and bloody feasts, dark within, huge; 619he himself is towering, and strikes the high stars — gods, keep such a plague from the earth! — not easy for anyone to look on, nor to address. 622He feeds on the flesh and dark blood of wretched men.
623I saw with my own eyes, when he seized two bodies of our number in his great hand and, lying back in the middle of the cave, smashed them on a rock, and the threshold, spattered, swam with gore; 626I saw when he chewed limbs dripping with black blood, and the still-warm joints quivered beneath his teeth. 628Not unpunished, indeed; 628Ulysses did not suffer such things, nor did the Ithacan forget himself in so great a crisis. 630For as soon as, gorged with the feast and buried in wine, he laid down his drooping neck, and lay sprawling huge through the cave, belching gore and gobbets mixed with bloody wine in his sleep, we, having prayed to the great gods and drawn lots for our parts, pour round him together on all sides, and bore out his eye with a sharp weapon — huge, the single eye that lurked beneath his grim brow, like an Argive shield or the lamp of Phoebus — and at last we gladly avenge the shades of our comrades.
639But flee, poor wretches, flee, and break your cable from the shore. 641For of the same kind and size as Polyphemus, who pens his woolly flocks in his hollow cave and milks their udders, a hundred other unspeakable Cyclopes live all along these curving shores and roam the high mountains. 645Already the moon's horns have filled with light for the third time since I began to drag out my life in the woods among the deserted lairs and haunts of wild beasts, and to watch the vast Cyclopes from a rock, trembling at the sound of their feet and their voices. 649A wretched diet, berries and stony cornels, the branches give me, and plants feed me with their torn-up roots.
651Scanning everything, I caught sight of this fleet coming to the shore for the first time. 652To it, whatever it might be, I gave myself up: it is enough to have escaped that unspeakable race. 654Rather do you take this life of mine by any death you like.'