The Titanomachy

Ten years of deadlock

Cronus rules the Titans, the older generation of gods. Zeus, once he has grown to manhood, comes against him to take the sky. The early Greek poet Hesiod sets the two armies on two mountains. The Titans hold high Othrys. The Olympians, “the gods, givers of good,” hold Olympus.

Neither side can break the other. For ten full years, Hesiod says, they fight without pause. The hard strife has no close and no end on either side.

The deadlock ends when Zeus frees three prisoners: Cottus, Briareos and Gyes, known as the Hundred-Handed. Cronus had bound them in cruel chains, and Zeus brings them back up into the light. He feeds them on nectar and ambrosia to restore their strength.

The three are hungry for war, and they turn on the Titans. From their strong hands they launch 300 rocks, one after another. Zeus adds his own weapon. His heart is filled with fury, and he no longer holds back his power. He hurls lightning from Olympus, and the earth and the vast wood around the fighting catch fire.

The Titans in Tartarus

Beaten by strength, the Titans are bound in bitter chains and thrown under the wide earth. They fall as far below the earth as the sky is above it. Hesiod measures that distance by how long a falling object takes to cross it. A bronze anvil dropped from the sky would fall for nine nights and days before it reached the earth. It would fall the same time again before it reached Tartarus, the place of their prison.

A bronze fence runs round the place. By the plan of Zeus, the Titans are hidden there in misty darkness. Gyes, Cottus and Obriareus, who fought to put them there, stay on as their guards, “trusty warders of Zeus who holds the aegis.”

A lost epic of the war

Hesiod’s is not the only ancient telling. A separate poem, also called the Titanomachy, told the same war. It was attributed to Eumelus of Corinth. In ancient times it was read as part of the Epic Cycle, a series of long poems that carried the story from the birth of the gods to the end of the age of heroes.

Almost nothing of its own account of the fighting survives in a form that can be set against Hesiod. What is left is a small number of lines, quoted centuries later by other writers for unrelated reasons. There is no rival story left to compare with Hesiod scene by scene.

A wrestling match at Olympia

At Olympia, the ancient traveller Pausanias records a version with no war at all. The learned men of Elis told him that Cronus had been the first king of heaven. A temple to Cronus, they said, once stood in the sanctuary, the holy ground of Olympia, before Zeus was worshipped there at all.

Pausanias gives two local accounts of how the throne then passed to Zeus. Some said that Zeus wrestled Cronus for it, on the ground of the sanctuary itself. Others said the games held there afterwards were a celebration of his victory. Pausanias does not choose between them.

Rulers before Cronus

Another tradition survives only because a much later poet used it. In the poem of Apollonius Rhodius, the singer Orpheus tells of an older stage. Olympus first belonged to Ophion and Eurynome, a daughter of Ocean. Then Cronus and Rhea took it from them by force, and the pair fell into the sea. Hesiod’s poem, the Theogony, has no such stage. In his account Cronus rules from the start, and Zeus alone overthrows him.

So the succession of rulers ends in three different ways. Zeus imprisons an enemy army, or he wrestles one king, or he takes a throne that had already been seized once before. At Olympia, the hill of Cronus still rises above the sanctuary of Zeus. The hill does not show which of these contests put the younger god below it.