The Gigantomachy

The birth of the Giants

The Giants are children of Earth. Their story begins with violence among the oldest gods. The god Cronus mutilates Sky, and Sky’s blood falls on Earth. From it she bears new powers.

The early Greek poet Hesiod lists them in his poem the Theogony: the Erinyes, the Meliae, and the great Giants, already armed and holding long spears. Hesiod gives the Giants this dangerous entrance, but no battle. The war that made them famous does not appear in his poem.

The ancient writer Apollodorus, who set down the fullest version of the war, gives Earth a reason to send the Giants against the gods. Earth is angry about what happened to the Titans, another set of her children. So she bears the Giants to take revenge for them.

The oracle and the herb

In Apollodorus, the gods learn of an oracle, a prophecy from the gods. It says that no Giant can die by the hand of a god alone. Only a mortal fighting beside the gods can finish the Giants off.

Earth hears of this and goes looking for a herb that would protect the Giants even against that mortal. Zeus moves first. He forbids the Dawn, the Moon and the Sun to shine. Then, in the dark, he gathers the herb himself before anyone else can reach it. He sends the goddess Athena to fetch the hero Heracles.

The gods and their Giants

Apollodorus then gives a list of the fighting, one Giant at a time. Zeus and Heracles together bring down Porphyrion. Apollo and Heracles share Ephialtes, with an arrow in each eye. The god Dionysus kills Eurytus with his thyrsus, a kind of staff. The goddess Hecate kills Clytius with fire, and the god Hephaestus kills Mimas with molten metal.

Heracles shoots Alcyoneus with an arrow, but the Giant cannot die on the ground where he was born, and he revives as he falls. On Athena’s advice, Heracles drags him outside Pallene, and there he dies. Athena throws the island of Sicily on Enceladus. Poseidon kills Polybotes, Hermes kills Hippolytus and Artemis kills Gration. The Fates finish off Agrius and Thoas with bronze clubs. Each god and each Giant on the list has a story of their own, which the list only points to.

An older telling in Pindar

The war was not new when Apollodorus wrote it down. Its first surviving telling comes from the poet Pindar, in an ode, or song of praise, of about 476 BC. That is generations before anything of Apollodorus’s fuller account survives.

In the ode, the seer Teiresias tells Amphitryon what the baby Heracles will become. Among the deeds he foresees is this: “when the gods meet the giants in battle on the plain of Phlegra, the shining hair of the giants will be stained with dirt beneath the rushing arrows of that hero.” Pindar names the place and the weapon. He gives no oracle to explain why a mortal is needed there at all.

The battle in stone

Sculptors showed the battle long before Apollodorus set it in prose. The Siphnian Treasury at Delphi has a frieze, a carved band of sculpture, along its north side. It was carved around 530 to 525 BC. The gods and Giants stand out deeply from the stone, with their names cut beside them. The names do not match his list. Kantharos, Astarias, Biatas and Mimon fall there, and none of them appears in his account.

The east metopes of the Parthenon in Athens were carved in the 440s BC. Metopes are the carved panels set high along the outside of a temple. These are now in the Acropolis Museum. Athena again stands at the centre. One panel shows Hermes over a fallen Giant, usually identified as Hippolytus. Hippolytus was killed while Hermes wore the helmet of invisibility that the god Hades lent him for the fight. Apollodorus gives the same pair centuries later.

One place under two names

The sources do not agree on where the fight happened. Apollodorus says that some give the birthplace of the Giants as Phlegra, and others as Pallene. He does not choose between them.

The geographer Strabo does choose. He says Pallene was the place “called Phlegra in still earlier times”. Pallene is a peninsula. Potidaea once stood on its narrow neck of land, and Cassandreia was later built on the same spot.

Strabo then gives two ways to read this. The stories some people tell about the place are myths, he writes. Others give a more believable account, of “a certain barbarous and impious tribe” that held the place until Heracles broke it up on his way home from Troy.

Giants and Titans confused

The Giants and the Titans are two different sets of children of Earth. One set was born from her union with Sky. The other came from his spilled blood. Ancient writers were already confusing them by the time these accounts were written down.

The first sentence of Apollodorus ties the two together as cause and effect: Earth makes the Giants because of what happened to the Titans. The later writer Hyginus goes further and mixes the two lists. He names Coeus and Astraeus as Giants, though both are Titans in the family tree of Hesiod and nowhere else.

Athens shows the same blending. At the festival of the Panathenaea, a robe called the peplos was carried up to the Acropolis for Athena. Plato has Socrates point to it as public evidence of “fearful enmities and battles… represented in varied designs”. The playwright Euripides has a chorus wonder what to weave onto the robe. The chorus chooses the Titans over the Giants: “the race of Titans, put to sleep by Zeus the son of Cronos with bolt of flashing flame.”