This review owes much to F. Lissarrague, A. Uhlig, R. Fowler and M. Warner, who made brief presentations as part of an online joint launch on 3 September 2020 of the two books under review. I should start with the universal observation of the 43 participants that these two books are not just erudite, but that they are also both charming. The four presenters were right that it repays to go back and forth between the two sections of Buxton and Aguirre, comparing the ancient with the post-antique. Equally, Hunter and Laemmle as well as Buxton and Aguirre are essential guides to each other. The ‘Cambridge Green and Yellow’ uses J. Diggle's (1984) OCT, and Hunter, when asked why he thought a new commentary desirable given R. Seaford's 1984 commentary, answered that ‘the Cyclops is not the same text as in the 1980s because its audience is not the same and so needs a new commentary’. He elaborated that the ‘Cyclops in a sense is all of us and so appeals to our inner Cyclops’. In both of these comments Hunter put his finger on why these two books are so essential and why consulting both yields more than their sum. Two examples by way of illustration: the etymology for Polyphemus cited by Buxton in the first part of the book (pp. 1–231) derives from ‘talks a lot’, and for Aguirre, in the second part of the book (pp. 233–375), the Latinised spelling Polyfemus encouraged the false etymology ‘[had] lots of women’. Secondly, for Buxton, Theocritus is a key moment in the process of ‘humanising’ Polyphemus; Ovid's Galatea is not possible without Theocritus, and the increasing emphasis on Galatea over Odysseus in the Middle Ages and Renaissance bifurcates the reception of Polyphemus, in which sympathy and empathy incrementally become greater over time. This is surely true of the information Aguirre sets before the reader. Hunter's well-respected publications on Theocritus and Callimachus (sometimes with Laemmle) and on post-antique reception (particularly his collaboration with Uhlig) are everywhere apparent in the commentary, which reads Polyphemus in the double lens of both what he must have been for Euripides and for directions the myth would take. In this, Laemmle's work on courtship in Greek poetry makes them well-suited collaborators.

The number of sources, the attention to detail and the precision in observation in both of these books is impressive. Lissarrague was right to note that the four authors in the two books bring together so much information that has escaped even the experts. The life of Aesop, correctly, is cited as fictional; Polyphemus (with the exception of Buxton and Aguirre, p. 225) is ‘anthropophagous’ and not a ‘cannibal’. Several illustrations of Buxton and Aguirre come from private collections that would otherwise remain unobserved, such as several carved sarcophagi lids, or are now lost. Buxton chased down a 1908 drawing to understand better the now unintelligible detail of the eye of Polyphemus in the Tomb Orcus II. The sheer number of illustrations (Buxton 72, Aguirre 81), aided by careful organisation, allows the material to tell its own story and helps the reader gauge immediately the main divisions of the Buxton and Aguirre book on the ‘eye’, the three Cyclopes at the forge of Hephaestus, the romance of Galatea, and Odysseus and Polyphemus; for this last, one should flip through the two parts of Buxton and Aguirre with Hunter and Laemmle pp. 9–21 in the other hand. That the two halves of Buxton and Aguirre follow the same format renders the book a useful ancient versus modern diptych.

There is much more that is known now about the Cyclops and about its genre since Seaford (1984), and here Hunter and Laemmle beg comparison with B. Seidensticker's new commentary in German (2020; see review in CR 71 [2021], 00–00) and the pages in P. O'Sullivan and C. Collard on the Cyclops (Euripides Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyr Drama [2013]; introduction, pp. 1–71; text and commentary, pp. 74–226). It would be fair to say that O'Sullivan and Collard expand greatly upon R. Krumeich, N. Pechstein and B. Seidensticker (Das griechische Satyrspiel [1999]; on Cyclops pp. 431–41), but, because their focus is wider, cannot devote as much detail as Seaford (pp. 1–60), Seidensticker (pp. 1–64) and Hunter and Laemmle (pp. 1–52).

The dating of the play to 408 bc should now be considered settled. No serious study of this play since W. Arrowsmith (1956) and D.F. Sutton (1980) has defended a 424 bc date; apart from numerous other difficulties, no amount of scholarly gymnastics could place Cyclops and Aristophanes’ Knights in the same year. S. Schein, author of the ‘Green and Yellow’ of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (2013), noted in the virtual book launch the closeness of the two plays particularly in stage set, adduced also by Hunter and Laemmle among other arguments for 408 bc (pp. 38–47, esp. 41–2), a date already favoured by Seaford (pp. 48–51), O'Sullivan and Collard (pp. 39–41) and accepted also by Seidensticker (pp. 46–50). Hunter and Laemmle resist seeing Cyclops as a response to criticism in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (pp. 40–1) and set aside the Sicilian expedition (pp. 44–5) as an artistic watershed of sorts; they more helpfully consider Ion and the fragmentary Hypsipyle as closer in style and so a better barometer for the date. Hunter and Laemmle feel under an obligation to mention the British Museum vase (1947.7–14.18) depicting the blinding of Polyphemus with satyrs at the right edge but, like Krumeich (‘auf die anderen Satyrdramen des Euripides ausgedehnt’, Krumeich et al. [1999], 440–1), consider the vase earlier than the play (pp. 46–7).

A general look at satyr drama leads to discussion of themes, such as Seaford (pp. 33–6; followed closely by A. Antonopoulos's introduction to Reconstructing Satyr Drama [2020]; less so O'Sullivan and Collard, pp. 28–39). Here, Hunter and Laemmle distinguish themselves. Rather than a list of features, they walk the reader through a history of the genre, in which the earliest decades of the genre are arguably its high point (p. 21), through to Aristotle and his pupil Chamaeleon presented as atavistic and anachronistic (pp. 22–3). Thus they place the Cyclops in a continuum in which the genre was continually re-inventing itself as a bulwark. The changing relationship of the satyr play to the trilogy (p. 24) is part of the process, and the repeated plot line (p. 26), that is, the inevitable bumbling of the satyr chorus in whatever strikes their fancy initially, becomes paramount. Here the Pronomos Vase gains importance (pp. 27–31) as it speaks more to ‘costume’, ‘stage action’ and ‘attitude’ than ‘theme’. The Cyclops is not devoid of themes, true also of other satyr plays, but they are themes of their times (p. 31), particularly that of social cohesion and self-congratulation of the male citizen audience, something long noted by M. Griffith (in G.W.M. Harrison [ed.], Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play [2005], pp. 161–99) among others.

The political Polyphemus is not absent in Hunter and Laemmle (pp. 31–4; frequens O'Sullivan) in spite of Seaford's remark at the virtual book launch, according to which Polyphemus is a stand-in for the end of the Pisistratids in a pre-Euripidean Cyclops or the ogre of the day, as the Trojan War was read politically vis-à-vis the Persians and other enemies. Here the threads of the two books and the presentations of Warner and Uhlig all come together, and ultimately hark back to Hunter's observation that there is an ‘inner Polyphemus’ in all of us. Polyphemus is an ur-ogre in literature (for Seidensticker 2020, p. 10, his main theme) and even though the satyrs are wild and hybrids, their make-up is more human than horse and they strive (unsuccessfully and ridiculously) to be more like us. Edmund Spenser understood this of Alberon the satyr in The Faerie Queene. Over time the Cyclops becomes more and more a figure of bathos, less a figure of fun (Warner). O'Sullivan's ‘Sophisticated Cyclops’ (in G.W.M. Harrison [ed.], Satyr Drama: Tragedy at Play [2005], pp. 119–59) had been anticipated by Oscar Wilde, and it is implied in Buxton's answer to the question that ‘what a monster was to the Greeks and Romans and what it is to us is central to the book’. Here he meant the one co-authored with Aguirre, but it applies equally to Hunter and Laemmle. In modern literature, and so in the attitudes that rub off on ancient literature, monsters are being rehumanised. The cave is ceasing to be seen as a place of danger but rather as one of refuge, so Uhlig in her presentation. In Euripides, Odysseus and his crew initially go into the cave for shelter; danger follows them in, it does not precede them.

So, in the end, in these two books one has a world in which, even stretching back to antiquity, Euripides, through to his modern successors, ‘paints a supernatural way of life, giving way to civilization’, as observed by Warner. None of the authors of these two books force the evidence or make choices that privilege an interpretation. What we have, so Buxton, is a myth of Polyphemus that is not stable at any time or in any genre. This makes perfect sense of the ancient art, the post-antique art and the Cyclops of Euripides, which Hunter and Laemmle challenge us to see not as a representative of a genre set in mortar but as a phenomenon of the time in which it was written. I suspect, if we had more of other dramatic versions of this myth (e.g. Krumeich et al. [1999], pp. 218–21 on satyr play by Aristias), we would have several Cyclopes.