Cratinus’s frequent assimilation of the epic tradition into his comedies has led one critic to label him not just para-but quasi-Homeric (Silk 2000.305). Epic, especially but not exclusively Homeric epic, pervades the poetic world of Aristophanes’ older rival as a source of political-allegorical plots, 1 moral and ideological paradigms, 2 and more or less parodically grand stylistic and metrical effects, 3 as well as the background of his generic self-definition. In Archilochoi (frags. 1–16 KA), Cratinus even brought Homer onstage. The agon, pitting Archilochus on one side against Homer and Hesiod on the other, concluded with the victory of Archilochus’s iambus, to which Cratinus consistently assigned a privileged position within the set of his generic affiliations. 4 It is not clear whether Homer and Hesiod suffered a crushing defeat—whether, in other words, Archilochus’s victory translated into a subversion of the usual genre hierarchy (Bakola 2010.79) or left the two epic poets’ literary authority substantially intact (Revermann 2013.117). This paper considers a different play, Odysseis (Ὀδυσσῆς), which supplies the best-preserved comic spoof of the epic encounter between Odysseus and the Cyclops (frags. 143–57 KA). I suggest that Cratinus conceives his mise en scène of Book 9 of the Odyssey as a figurative representation