3.6.8: The Battle with the Titans

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The Titan Oceanus. (Mary Harrsch, CC BY-NC-SA, via World History Encyclopedia)

The Battle with the Titans

The battle is prefaced with a brief reminder of Ouranos’ fear of his sons–the Giants Kottos, Gyes, and Briateus–whom he had bound and forced underground.

But when first their father was vexed in his heart with Obriareus and Cottus and Gyes, he bound them in cruel bonds, because he was jealous of their exceeding manhood and comeliness and great size: and he made them live beneath the wide-pathed earth he made them live beneath the wide-pathed earth (ll. 617-19).

However, Zeus, aware of the injustice and sensing an opportunity, frees them, igniting the climactic battle in the ten-year war between the Olympians who are aided by the Giants (the Titan sons of Ouranos), and the Titans (those born from Kronos alone). Zeus stirs them into action with a stirring battle speech. War growing in their hearts, the allies commence in a boulder-hurdling, fire-in-the-sky battle of seismic proportions, which only ends when the Giant brothers bury the Titans in the pits of Tartarus under three hundred boulders. The vast depth of Tartarus is vividly described in metaphor:

For a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth: and again, a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth (II. 723-25).

To further secure the rebellious Titans, Zeus places a bronze gate around the pit and places the three brothers as “warders” (wardens) of the prison. Those who know Greek mythology well, though, will note parallels between the ten-year war and another ten-year war in Troy, recounted in The Iliad, a work that serves to close out the era of Greek mythology.

The Olympians’ and Giants’ mighty victory is hardly over when Earth releases another terrible offspring, a child made from her union with Tartarus, the dreadful Typheon, a creature of 100 snake-like heads, each belching fire and filling the air with roars like a bull and a lion, and terrible hissing, descriptions that suggest the “monster” is volcanic activity. Lens theory offers some clarity here. Volcanic eruptions are commonly previewed by earthquakes, which might feel like an earth-shaking clash of gods, followed by the four phases of the actual eruption: ash and pumice ejecta; magma ejecta and pyroclastic surges, accompanied by reports of thunder and dry lightning; magma fountaining; caldera collapse. Each phase is accompanied by a cacophony of noise–roars, echos, hisses–as the mountain explodes in a terrifying and awesome show (Barber and Barber 82-85). Hesiod’s description balances the tension of awe and fear, not unlike the experience of observing a volcanic eruption:

From his shoulders grew an hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvellous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed (II. 826-39).

Zeus swings once more into the fray, exercising his supreme Olympic power, firing his lightning and thunderbolts at Typheon’s heads, cauterizing the necks as he cuts off the heads. Once the beast dies (collapses), Zeus buries him in Tartarus, and turns to his preferred pastime, procreating.