expressing "a shift of political alliances ostensibly achieved by Alcibiades". Like Sophocles' Philoctetes, Euripides' Cyclops made an appeal on behalf of Alcibiades that he be allowed to return from exile. 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. The Homeric Polyphemus is brutish and alien to Odysseus and his crew. Euripides' Polyphemus is sophisticated and intellectually analogous to sophists of the fifth century. 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". In Cyclops both Odysseus and the Cyclops employ deft and appropriative rhetorical manipulation, "aggressive sophistry that reduces men to meat, and fine talk to deceptive barter". Gluttonous ingestion is a theme and "[t]he imagery of grotesque ingestion surfaces almost immediately in the play". Euripides' Cyclops has been described as "a figure of proto-Rabelaisian excess" and linked to ideas contained in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Polyphemus "likes to talk, he likes to eat, [...] to talk about eating, or to try to eat those who talk to him". The Cyclops and the satyrs continually refer to the Cyclops' belly and the satisfaction thereof. Interaction between Odysseus and the Cyclops is based on food and exchange. In the play the Cyclops suggests that people are the source of morality and not the gods. He says that he sacrifices only to his belly, the greatest of divinities. Such impiety was of substantial interest to Athenians in the fifth century. Euripides often dealt with "the consequences of impiety". One facet of Greek religion was "to honor and placate the gods because they are powerful". The Athenians judicially punished philosophers and sophists. Euripides himself may have left Athens in "self-imposed exile". But in his play his Cyclops is punished for impiety by having his eye burned out. In Euripides' plays, "Characters might refuse to worship certain gods, blaspheme them, or even at times question the morality of the gods, but there is little evidence of what we would call atheism, a complete lack of belief in any god, in Greek thought". The location of the cyclopes in the Odyssey is not specified, but Euripides' Cyclops is set in Sicily, possibly following Epicharmus, portrayed as barbarous and desolate and