On the Sauce: Cratinus, Cyclopean Poetics, and the Roiling Sea of Epic

Abstract

This paper suggests that in the play Odysseis , Cratinus turns Polyphemus into a figure of the Archilochean satirist and thus into an icon of his comic mode. The extant fragments of the play present a web of interlocking marine and culinary images rich in self-reflexive meaning. The intertextual analysis of these images—both at the level of metaphor and phonic materialità —reveals that Cratinus appropriates Polyphemus’s sublime abjection to depict the Archilochean stance of his comic self as the disturbing eruption of the Iliadic past into the world of the Odyssey .