[1] It is likely to have been the fourth part of a tetralogy presented by Euripides in a dramatic festival in 5th Century BC Athens, although its intended and actual performance contexts are unknown.

Odysseus enters from the cave and tells them to be quiet and come and help burn the eye out.

[5] Euripides' play combines the myth of Dionysus's capture by pirates with the episode in Homer's Odyssey of Odysseus' time with the cyclops Polyphemus.

[10] In Cyclops Euripides employed "metapoetically loaded terms" like second and double and new to highlight interactions with his sources, familiar and foundational texts in Athenian education.

[18] It was almost certainly known by Euripides' audience that a particular Alcander had stuck a stick into the eye of Lycurgus the Spartan lawgiver.

[20] Like Sophocles' Philoctetes, Euripides' Cyclops made an appeal on behalf of Alcibiades that he be allowed to return from exile.

[21] Euripides also encouraged his audience to consider the recent Athenian enterprise against Sicily, which was undertaken for greed against an intractable and difficult enemy when Athens could barely provide money or men and which did not go well.

[23] The influence of the Sophists is manifest throughout Euripides' plays "not only in his rhetorical style but also in his skeptical, down‐to‐earth approach".

[26] Euripides' Cyclops has been described as "a figure of proto-Rabelaisian excess" and linked to ideas contained in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.

The satyrs play an important role in driving the plot without any of them actually being the lead role, which, in the satyr play generally, was always reserved for a god or tragic hero (in this case Odysseus).

"[37] Satyrs were widely seen as mischief-makers who routinely played tricks on people and interfered with their personal property.

[38] They had insatiable sexual appetites and often sought to seduce or ravish both nymphs and mortal women alike (though not always successfully).

[36][38] A single elderly satyr named Silenus was believed to have been the tutor of Dionysus on Mount Nysa.

[36] The identity of satyrs is plastic and somewhat elusive, but a salient aspect in Cyclops is the "comic inversion of societal norms".

[9] They were overall "creatures that were funny and joyful, pleasing and delightful, feminine and masculine, but also cowardly and disgusting, pitiful and lamentable, terrifying and horrific".

[38][40] In Cyclops the chorus "claim to know an incantation of Orpheus that will bring down a form of fiery destruction upon their enemy".

[41] When the satyrs identify the Cyclops as a "son of Earth" and present their firebrand as igniting the Cyclops' skull rather than his eye they mimic a traditional Orphic incantation and Zeus's punishment of the Titans, the "sons of Earth" and primordial enemies of the Orphic Dionysus.

In the play the satyrs are devotees of Dionysus and on the island of Sicily, known to be "a center of Orphic cult".

[43] Cyclops has been both lauded and scorned, with hostile commentators criticising its simplicity of plot and characterisation.