Athena, Goddess of Copyediting

Ancient pottery depicting Athena and Enceladus fighting. Louvre Museum. Public domain.

My first exposure to Greek mythology was at the Lyceum—not the famed Lykeion in Athens, where Aristotle and his pupils strolled around as they discussed philosophy and beauty, but a movie theater on Fulton Road in Cleveland, where my brothers and I spent Saturday afternoons. The Lyceum was classic as opposed to classical: popcorn in red-and-white striped boxes, a stern lady usher who confiscated the candy we snuck in from outside, buzzers under the seats for a gimmicky thrill.

Every week, the Lyceum showed a double feature, usually a horror movie—The Mummy, Godzilla, The Creature from the Black Lagoon—paired with something mildly pornographic (and highly educational). At one Saturday matinee, I laid eyes for the first time on the Cyclops. The movie was Ulysses (1955), starring Kirk Douglas as the man of many turnings. In a way, it, too, was a horror movie, full of monsters and apparitions: a witch who turned men into pigs, sea serpents, Anthony Quinn in a short tight skirt.

Ulysses is the Latinate name for Odysseus and the one preferred by Hollywood and James Joyce. How Odysseus became Ulysses is, like many things that happened between Greece and Rome, impossible to say, or delta, of in Ionic Greek was originally an , or lambda, in the Dorian and Aeolic dialects. Delta (Δ) and lambda (Λ) are similar in form—a wedge with or without a bar—but to my knowledge no one has suggested that was the ancient equivalent of a typo for . The name may have reached Rome independently as through Sicily, the traditional home of the Cyclops.