Hesiod says that there were three Cyclopes – Brontes, Steropes and Arges – and that they were the offspring of Uranus and Gaia. They were gigantic, monstrous craftsmen who in some accounts made Zeus’ thunderbolts, in others, the walls of Mycenae. The Cyclopes of the Odyssey are more human and more numerous than those of the Theogony, but their single eye is still a mark of savagery. Homer calls them ‘lawless’. Polyphemus is more lawless than most: he has a taste for human flesh and dashes out the brains of Ulysses’ companions ‘as though they had been puppies’ before eating them raw. Homer does not identify the island where the renegade Cyclops lived, but Ovid put him on the slopes of Etna in Sicily and gave him an affecting, if homicidal, passion for the nymph Galatea. Painted on vases, cast in bronze or carved in marble, Polyphemus was depicted by the Greeks throwing boulders or else reeling in agony as Ulysses drives a burning stick into his single eye.
Many teratologists have linked the deformity to the myth. They argue that the iconographic model for the semi-divine monster was a human infant. Certainly the model, if it ever existed, must have been only faintly remembered. Differences in size and vigour aside, even the earliest representations of Polyphemus put his single eye where you would expect it, above his nose. But the single eye of a cyclopic infant invariably lies beneath its nose – or what is left of it. Others have argued, more or less plausibly, that the Cyclopes were inspired by the semi-fossilised remains of dwarf elephants that litter the Mediterranean islands.
Whatever its origins, Homer to Vrolik, the iconography of the Cyclops shows a clear evolutionary lineage. Homer’s Polyphemus is monstrous; Ovid’s is too, although he is also a sentimentalist. But within sixty years of the poet’s death in 17 ad, the Cyclops would appear in a different guise. It would become a race of beings that had ontological status, supported by the authority of travellers and philosophers. In 77 ad Pliny the Elder finished his encyclopaedic Historia naturalis. Drawing on earlier Greek writers like Megasthenes, who around 303 bc travelled as an ambassador to India in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests, Pliny peopled India and Ethiopia (the two were barely distinguished) with a host of fabulous races. There were the Sciapodes, who had a single enormous foot which they used as a sort of umbrella; dwarfish Pygmies; dog-headed Cynocephali; headless people with eyes between their shoulderblades; people with eight fingers and toes on each hand; people who lived for a thousand years; people with enormous ears; and people with tails. And then there were the single-eyed people: Pliny calls them the Arimaspeans and says that they fight with griffins over gold.
This was the beginning of a tradition of fabulous races that persisted for about fifteen centuries. By the third century ad, Christian writers had adopted the tradition; by the fifth century, St Augustine is wondering whether these races are descended from Adam. In the Middle Ages, the Cyclopes appears essentially unaltered from antiquity in manuscripts of wonder-books such as Thomas a Cantimpré’s De Naturis Rerum which was composed around 1240. In the fourteenth century, their biblical parentage is settled: they are the deformed descendants of Cain and Ham. Around the same time they appear in illuminations of Marco Polo’s travels (the Italian unaccountably fails to mention their existence); in the early 1500s one appears on the wall of a Danish church dressed in the striped pantaloons, floppy hat and leather purse of a late-medieval Baltic dandy. With time, the Cyclops becomes smaller, tamer and moves closer to home.
The first illustration of a cyclopic child, as distinct from a Cyclops, was given by Fortunio Liceti. In the 1634 edition of his De monstrorum he describes an infant girl who was born in Firme, Italy, in 1624 and who, he says, had a well-organised body but a head of horrible aspect. In the middle of her face, in place of a nose, there was a mass of skin that resembled a penis or a pear. Below this was a square-shaped piece of reddish skin on which one could see two very close-set eyes like the eyes of a chicken. Although the child died at birth she is depicted with the proportions of a robust ten-year-old, a legacy of the giants that preceded her.
Liceti describes another case of cyclopia as well, this time in a pair of conjoined twins whose crania are fused so that they face away from each other in true Janus style. Conjoined twinning and cyclopia is an unusual combination of anomalies, and one would be inclined to doubt its authenticity but for a 1916 clinical report of a pair of conjoined twins who showed much the same combination of features. And then there is the unusual provenance of Liceti’s drawing. It is, he says, a copy of one preserved in the collection of His Eminence the Reverend Cardinal Barberini at Rome, and the original, which now seems to be lost, was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.
Looking at his bottled babies, Willem Vrolik recognised that some were more severely afflicted than others. Some had only a single eyeball concealed within the eye-orbit, but in others two eyeballs were visible. Some had a recognisable nose, others had none at all. Modern clinicians recognise cyclopia as one extreme in a spectrum of head defects. At the other extreme are people whose only oddity is a single incisor placed symmetrically in their upper jaw instead of the usual two.
The single eye of a cyclopic child is the external sign of a disorder that reaches deep within its skull. All normal vertebrates have split brains. We, most obviously, have left and right cerebral hemispheres that we invoke when speaking of our left or right ‘brains’. Cyclopic infants do not. Instead of two distinct cerebral hemispheres, two optic lobes and two olofactory lobes, their forebrains are fused into an apparently indivisible whole. Indeed, clinicians call this whole spectrum of birth defects the ‘holoprosencephaly series’, from the Greek: holo – whole, prosencephalon – forebrain. It is, in all its manifestations, the most common brain deformity in humans, afflicting 1 in 16,000 live-born children and 1 in 200 miscarried foetuses.
The ease with which foetuses become cyclopic is frightening. Fish embryos will become cyclopic if they are heated, cooled, irradiated, deprived of oxygen, or exposed to ether, chloroform, acetone, phenol, butyric acid, lithium chloride, retinoic acid, alcohol or merely table salt. In the 1950s an epidemic of cyclopic lambs in the western United States was caused by pregnant ewes grazing on corn lilies, a plant of the subalpine meadows which has leaves rich in toxic alkaloids. In humans, diabetic mothers have a two-hundred-fold increased risk of giving birth to cyclopic children, as do alcoholic mothers.