The Cyclops myth is not really explained by fossil elephant skulls; it springs from fear of the unknown and the monstrous, not a tidy paleontological coincidence.

35:30because you have, you know, you have the trunk, the nasal cavity, if you look at the skull of an elephant, it does look a little bit like a kind of single eye. I mean, there's no proof for it, but it's a kind of it's a wonderful idea. >> Is this not trying too hard to find a sort of benile, mundane explanation for what's clearly um a fantastical story? I

35:49mean, to me, it would seem like this isn't inspired by skulls of like elephants. This is inspired by the fear of the unknown, the fear of the monstrous, all of that kind of stuff. I think that the story of these monsters lurking on strange islands that these are anxieties that are bred of the age in which the Odyssey is being written down. And it's an age when Greek

36:11colonists are starting to settle Sicily and the western reaches of the Mediterranean. And I think that Polyphimas is a kind of nightmarish vision of a barbarian who does not live by the rules of life that the Greeks associate with civilization. So that's why Homer specifies that he drinks his wine neat. It's why he specifies that there's no agriculture. These are people who by the standards of the Greek

36:41colonists are backward and savage and kind of frightening for that reason. So clearly, as you say, I mean, Polyphimas is a figure of fantasy, one of the most memorable figures in the whole history of fantasy, but he is clearly, I think, bringing to life the anxieties of adventurers who are sailing into strange seas and and settling lands that that are often very hostile. So there is a

37:09brilliant book on this by um a scholar called Carol Douty, the raft of Adysius. And to quote from that, embedded within a familiar mythic story pattern of a time and people long ago are details and themes that belong to the contemporary world of its audience. And that's kind of what you would expect. And it it reminds me a bit of the way in which in the 1960s in Star Trek, if you watch it

37:34now, it's Captain Kirk going around, you know, strange planets and all of that, but so many of those episodes are plainly about anxieties and complex that are manifest in 1960s America. And you would think that probably, you know, mutis mutandez, the same is true of what's going on in the Odyssey that this is fantastical, but it is also kind of drawing on all kinds of anxieties that