to outwit the Cyclops

Sailing home from Troy, Odysseus and his men landed on a wild island and wandered, hungry, into a giant's cave. It belonged to Polyphemus, a Cyclops — a towering one-eyed monster, a son of the sea-god, who herded sheep and cared nothing for the laws of gods or men.

The Cyclops came home, rolled a boulder across the mouth of the cave that no twenty men could shift, and made his supper of two of Odysseus' crew. They were trapped. They could not kill the giant, for then no one could move the great stone — and even if they could, brute strength against such a creature was hopeless.

So Odysseus turned to his sharpest weapon: his mind. He offered the giant strong wine, and as it took hold he told him, with a sly smile, that his name was Nobody. When the Cyclops fell into a drunken sleep, the men heated a great stake in the fire and drove it into his single eye.

Blinded and bellowing, Polyphemus called to his fellow giants for help — but when they asked who had hurt him, he roared that Nobody had done it, and they shrugged and went away. At dawn Odysseus lashed his men beneath the giant's own sheep, and they rode out to freedom under the blind monster's groping hands.

So to outwit the Cyclops is to do just that: to beat an enemy far stronger than yourself not by matching his strength, but by being cleverer than he ever thought you could be.