Polyphemus - in Ovid's Metamorphoses

In Ovid's Metamorphoses

Further information: Acis and Galatea (mythology)

The Cyclops also appears in Ovid's story of Acis and Galatea. As a jealous suitor of the sea nymph, Galatea, he kills his rival Acis with a rock. Rather than telling the love stories of Odysseus and Aeneas, Ovid chooses to tell love stories about the monsters that those heroes experienced. Ovid's first century Roman audience would surely have had a basic knowledge of Polyphemus' role as an uncivilized cannibal in Book IX of the Odyssey, and this episode gives an amusing contrast to that characterization. Polyphemus is shown doing all of the things that a proper Roman suitor would do—trims his beard, composes a poem, etc.—which encourage the reader/hearer to cheer for him, even though his courtship is doomed to fail. Ovid tells this story shortly after the Judgement of Arms, where he shows how perceptions of Odysseus in Ovid's time were very different from the Archaic period in Greece. Ovid's self-conscious and urbane report appears to be suggesting in his uncharacteristic depiction of Polyphemus that it is possible for the way that readers view a character to drastically change over time.

Although the full story was described by Ovid, it was also mentioned by Philoxenus and Theocritus, and in Valerius Flaccus' version of Argonautica, among the themes painted on the Argos, "Cyclops from the Sicilian shore calls Galatea back."

During the Renaissance and Baroque the myth regained publicity and Luís de Góngora published his own "Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea" in 1613.

Polyphemus sings in Georg Friedrich Händel's popular 1718 setting of Acis and Galatea, an English language pastoral opera or masque with the libretto set by John Gay to Ovid's Metamorphosis. Here, the jealous monster scares the lovers in the aria "I rage, I melt, I burn" and then monstrously courts Galatea with his "O ruddier than the cherry". As he realizes how he frightens the one he would love, he resists mollification with "Love sounds the alarm" then ultimately interrupts their sweet duet, now a trio, and murders his opponent in a rage.