What was the Gigantomachy?

The Gigantomachy

The Gigantomachy is the war the Olympian gods fight against the Giants, sons of Earth. In Apollodorus, an oracle holds that no god can kill a Giant alone, so Zeus summons Heracles before Earth can find the herb that would protect the Giants even against a mortal. Hesiod knows only that the Giants were born, armoured, from the blood of the mutilated Sky; the war itself first survives in Pindar, writing generations before Apollodorus set the fuller version down, and by the time both were writing, some authors had already begun confusing the Giants with the Titans, an older and different set of Earth's children.

In short

In Apollodorus, the gods have an oracle that no Giant can be killed by a god alone, so Zeus gathers a protective herb himself, ahead of Earth, and sends Athena to fetch Heracles.
Hesiod's Theogony gives the Giants a birth (from the blood of the castrated Sky, armoured, spears in hand) but tells no war; the war's first surviving telling is Pindar's, an ode of about 476 BC.
Pindar sets the fight on the plain of Phlegra and has the hero's arrows stain the Giants' hair with dirt; Apollodorus keeps the same ground but adds that some call it Pallene instead.
Strabo identifies Pallene and Phlegra as the same peninsula, later the site of Cassandreia, and offers readers a choice between the mythical Giants and a rationalised account of a lawless tribe that Heracles broke up there.
The Siphnian Treasury frieze at Delphi (about 530-525 BC) and the Parthenon's east metopes (the 440s BC) both put the battle in stone centuries before Apollodorus put it in prose, and the Treasury names giants his list does not.
Hyginus lists Coeus and Astraeus, both Titans in Hesiod's genealogy, among the Giants: the confusion between the two wars is already old by the time Rome inherits it.

Earth arms new children from the blood of Sky

Cronus cuts Sky, blood falls on Earth, and she answers by bearing new powers. Hesiod’s Theogony names the Erinyes, the Meliae and great Giants already armed and holding long spears. It gives the Giants a dangerous entrance but no battle. The war for which they become famous is absent from the poem.

Its first surviving telling is Pindar’s, in an ode Perseus dates to about 476 BC, generations before anything of Apollodorus’s fuller account survives. Teiresias prophesies to Amphitryon what the infant Heracles will become, and 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 ground and the weapon. He supplies no oracle to explain why a mortal is needed there at all.

The oracle Apollodorus supplies

Apollodorus is where the reason arrives. Earth, vexed on account of the Titans, bears the Giants to avenge them, and the gods learn of an oracle holding that none of the Giants can die at a god’s hand alone: only a mortal fighting beside them can finish the Giants off. Earth goes looking for a herb that would protect the Giants even against that mortal. Zeus forestalls her. He forbids the Dawn, the Moon and the Sun to shine, gathers the herb himself in the dark before anyone else can reach it, and sends Athena to fetch Heracles.

What follows is a roster, one Giant to a line. Zeus and Heracles together bring down Porphyrion; Apollo and Heracles share Ephialtes, an arrow in each eye; Dionysus kills Eurytus with his thyrsus, Hecate kills Clytius with fire, Hephaestus kills Mimas with molten metal; Athena throws the island of Sicily on Enceladus and drags Alcyoneus outside Pallene to die, because on his own ground he cannot be killed at all; Poseidon accounts for Polybotes, Hermes for Hippolytus, Artemis for Gration, and the Fates finish Agrius and Thoas with bronze clubs. Each of them, god and Giant alike, carries a story the roster only points to.

What stood before Apollodorus wrote it down

Nothing about this fight was new when Apollodorus set it in prose. On the north frieze of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, carved around 530-525 BC, the gods and Giants meet in high relief with their names cut into the stone beside them, and the roster does not match his: Kantharos, Astarias, Biatas and Mimon fall there and appear nowhere in his account. On the Parthenon’s east metopes, carved in the 440s BC and held today in the Acropolis Museum, Athena again takes the centre, and one panel shows Hermes over a fallen Giant the museum reads as Hippolytus, killed while Hermes wore the helmet of invisibility Hades lent him for the fight, the same pairing Apollodorus gives centuries later.

One ground under two names

Where the fight happened is not settled either. Apollodorus gives the Giants’ birth as Phlegra according to some, Pallene according to others, and does not choose between them. Strabo does choose, identifying Pallene, the peninsula on whose isthmus Cassandreia was built where Potidaea had stood before it, as the place “called Phlegra in still earlier times.” He then offers two ways to take that identification: the stories some tell of it are mythical, he writes, but others give a more plausible account, of “a certain barbarous and impious tribe” that occupied the place until Heracles broke it up on his way home from Troy.

Titans under another name

The confusion between the Giants and the Titans, two different sets of Earth’s children, one born of her union with Sky and the other from his spilled blood, is already old by the time these accounts were written down. Apollodorus’s own first sentence ties the two together as cause and effect: Earth makes the Giants because of what happened to the Titans. Hyginus goes further and simply mixes the two lists, giving Coeus and Astraeus, both Titans in Hesiod’s genealogy and nowhere else, as Giants instead. Even the peplos carried up to the Acropolis at the Panathenaea, which Plato has Socrates cite as public evidence of “fearful enmities and battles… represented in varied designs,” draws the two wars together in the telling: Euripides has a chorus, weighing what to weave onto Athena’s robe, reach not for the Giants but for “the race of Titans, put to sleep by Zeus the son of Cronos with bolt of flashing flame.”

Where to stand

Halkidiki

Northern Greece

Strabo identifies the peninsula of Pallene, the ground on which Cassandreia was later built, with Phlegra, the plain the sources give as the Giants' birthplace and battlefield, and offers two ways to take that: some tell it as myth, others as the record of a lawless tribe that Heracles broke up there. Apollodorus keeps the same uncertainty, giving the Giants' birth as Phlegra according to some and Pallene according to others.
Halkidiki
Athens

Cities

The Parthenon's east metopes, carved in the 440s BC and held today in the Acropolis Museum, set the Gigantomachy over the temple's main entrance with Athena at its centre. Plato has Socrates point to the same battle woven, once every four years, into the robe carried up to the Acropolis at the Panathenaea.
Athens