The Titanomachy

Zeus comes against Cronus and cannot break the line

Cronus rules the Titans, and Zeus, grown to manhood, comes against him for the sky. Hesiod places the armies on two mountains: the Titans hold high Othrys, and the Olympians, “the gods, givers of good,” hold Olympus. Neither side can break the other. For ten full years, Hesiod says, they fight continually, and the hard strife has no close and no end on either side.

What breaks the deadlock

The stalemate ends when Zeus frees Cottus, Briareos and Gyes, the Hundred-Handed, from the cruel bonds Cronus had set on them, bringing them up again into the light. Fed on nectar and ambrosia to restore their strength, the three, insatiate for war, turn on the Titans: three hundred rocks, one upon another, launched from their strong hands. Zeus adds his own weapon. His heart filled with fury, he no longer holds back his might, and the lightning he hurls from Olympus sets the earth and the vast wood burning around the fighting.

Beaten by strength, the Titans are bound in bitter chains and hurled beneath the wide-pathed earth, as far down as the sky is high above it, a gap Hesiod measures by how long a falling object takes to cross it: a brazen anvil dropped from heaven would fall nine nights and days before reaching earth, and the same again before reaching Tartarus. A fence of bronze runs round the place, and by Zeus’s counsel the Titans are hidden there under misty gloom. Gyes, Cottus and Obriareus, who fought to put them there, remain as its guards, “trusty warders of Zeus who holds the aegis.”

An epic that does not survive

Hesiod’s is not the only ancient telling. A separate poem, also titled the Titanomachy and attributed to Eumelus of Corinth, told the same war and was read in antiquity as part of the Epic Cycle, the sequence of epics 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 has survived in a form that can be set against Hesiod’s: what is left is a small number of lines quoted centuries later by other writers for unrelated reasons, not a rival narrative that can be compared scene for scene.

Where Elis told it differently

At Olympia, Pausanias records a version that drops the war altogether. The learned men of Elis told him that Cronus had been the first king of heaven, and that a temple to him once stood in the sanctuary before Zeus was worshipped there at all. Of how the throne then passed to Zeus, Pausanias gives two local accounts rather than one: some said that Zeus wrestled Cronus himself for it, on the ground of the sanctuary; others said the games held there afterward were not that contest but a victory celebration for it. Pausanias does not choose between them.

A separate strand, older than either war or wrestling match, survives only because a much later poet used it. Apollonius Rhodius has Orpheus sing that Olympus belonged first to Ophion and Eurynome, daughter of Ocean, before Cronus and Rhea took it from them by strength of arm and the pair fell into the sea. Hesiod’s Theogony has no such stage: in his account Cronus rules from the start, and it is Zeus alone who unseats him.

The succession therefore ends in three different actions: Zeus imprisons an enemy army, wrestles one king, or inherits a throne already taken once before. At Olympia, the hill of Cronus remains above Zeus’s sanctuary without deciding which contest put the younger god below it.