Imagine waking up to find strangers in your home – eating your food, killing your animals, then laughing as they blind you. Later, they tell the world you were the monster.
We are describing one of the better known episodes of Homer’s Odyssey, written around the late 8th or early 7th century BC. The intruders are protagonist Odysseus’s men, and the “monster” they attack is Polyphemus, a solitary giant shepherd later remembered only as a cyclops.
For centuries, we’ve followed the hero’s journey without asking what it costs. But what if the cyclops wasn’t the monster, but just one of many lives shattered along the way?
