in Greek mythology and later Roman mythology, was a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead. The name is widely thought to mean 'round-eyed' or 'circle-eyed'. There may be depictions of cyclopses with a ridge or some sort of brow either below or above the eye, but usually the eye is centralised in the middle of face, directly above the nose.
In the Disney tale of Hercules, the Cyclops is a huge 50ft titan with layers of fat rippling off of it and virtually no hair, but a Cyclops can range in any size from 7 to 70 feet. In The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, they are fleeing from a giant cyclops with a genie. The Cyclops retrieves the lamp from the water after their ship capsizes. On board the ship, Sokurah tells Sinbad about how many ships crashed on the island and the Cyclops collected all their treasure. He offers it to him if they turn back to get the lamp, but Sinbad refuses. A Cyclops is usually associated with guarding treasure, like a Dragon or a Crow and they tend to live in caves high on mountains. Cyclops’ can be very musclely and strong and usually have a wooden or spiked club as their main weapon.
Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Theocritus, Callimachus, Euripides and Nonnus Dionysiaca are all authors and poets who have written about cyclopses within their odes and episodes.
In a famous episode of Homer's Odyssey, the hero Odysseus encounters the cyclops Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon and Thoosa (a nereid), who lives with his fellow Cyclopes in a distant country. Virgil, the Roman epic poet, wrote, in book three of The Aeneid, of how Aeneas and his crew landed on the island of the cyclops after escaping from Troy at the end of the Trojan War. Aeneas and his crew land on the island, when they are approached by a desperate Greek man from Ithaca, Achaemenides, who was stranded on the island a few years previously with Odysseus' expedition.
