Giants (Greek mythology)

[3] Archaic and Classical representations show Gigantes as man-sized hoplites (heavily armed ancient Greek foot soldiers) fully human in form.

The name "Gigantes" is usually taken to imply "earth-born",[6] and Hesiod's Theogony makes this explicit by having the Giants be the offspring of Gaia (Earth).

"[9] From these same drops of blood also came the Erinyes (Furies) and the Meliai (ash tree nymphs), while the severed genitals of Uranus falling into the sea resulted in a white foam from which Aphrodite grew.

[18] Though distinct in early traditions,[19] Hellenistic and later writers often confused or conflated the Giants and their Gigantomachy with an earlier set of offspring of Gaia and Uranus, the Titans and their war with the Olympian gods, the Titanomachy.

[20] This confusion extended to other opponents of the Olympians, including the huge monster Typhon,[21] the offspring of Gaia and Tartarus, whom Zeus finally defeated with his thunderbolt, and the Aloadae, the large, strong and aggressive brothers Otus and Ephialtes, who piled Pelion on top of Ossa in order to scale the heavens and attack the Olympians (though in the case of Ephialtes there was probably a Giant with the same name).

[31] The earlier seventh century BC poet Alcman perhaps had already used the Giants as an example of hubris, with the phrases "vengeance of the gods" and "they suffered unforgettable punishments for the evil they did" being possible references to the Gigantomachy.

[45] There are indications that there might have been a lost epic poem, a Gigantomachia, which gave an account of the war: Hesiod's Theogony says that the Muses sing of the Giants,[46] and the sixth century BC poet Xenophanes mentions the Gigantomachy as a subject to be avoided at table.

[49] The late sixth early fifth century BC lyric poet Pindar provides some of the earliest details of the battle between the Giants and the Olympians.

[54] The early 3rd century BC author Apollonius of Rhodes briefly describes an incident where the sun god Helios takes up Hephaestus, exhausted from the fight in Phlegra, on his chariot.

[60] Apollodorus, who also mentions the theft of Helios' cattle by Alcyoneus,[61] suggests a mother's revenge as the motive for the war, saying that Gaia bore the Giants because of her anger over the Titans (who had been vanquished and imprisoned by the Olympians).

Later in the Metamorphoses, Ovid refers to the Gigantomachy as: "The time when serpent footed giants strove / to fix their hundred arms on captive Heaven".

[75] Dionysus placed the donkeys in the skies in gratitude, and in vase paintings from the classical period, satyrs and Maenads can sometimes be seen confronting their gigantic opponents.

[76] A late Latin grammarian of the fifth century AD, Servius, mentions that during the battle, the eagle of Zeus (who once had been the boy Aëtos before his metamorphosis) assisted his master by placing the lightning bolts on his hands.

The name Phlegra and the Gigantomachy were also often associated, by later writers, with a volcanic plain in Italy, west of Naples and east of Cumae, called the Phlegraean Fields.

[84] According to the geographer Pausanias, the Arcadians claimed that battle took place "not at Pellene in Thrace" but in the plain of Megalopolis in the central Peloponnese where "rises up fire".

Individual battles between a Giant and a god might range farther afield, with Enceladus buried beneath Sicily, and Polybotes under the island of Nisyros (or Kos).

[91] From the sixth century BC onwards, the Gigantomachy was a popular and important theme in Greek art, with over six hundred representations cataloged in the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC).

[93] The Gigantomachy was depicted on the new peplos (robe) presented to Athena on the Acropolis of Athens as part of the Panathenaic festival celebrating her victory over the Giants, a practice dating from perhaps as early as the second millennium BC.

[94] The earliest extant indisputable representations of Gigantes are found on votive pinakes from Corinth and Eleusis, and Attic black-figure pots, dating from the second quarter of the sixth century BC (this excludes early depictions of Zeus battling single snake-footed creatures, which probably represent his battle with Typhon, as well as Zeus' opponent on the west pediment of the Temple of Artemis on Kerkyra (modern Corfu) which is probably not a Giant).

[97] These vases depict large battles, including most of the Olympians, and contain a central group which appears to consist of Zeus, Heracles, Athena, and sometimes Gaia.

[100] The fragments of one vase from this same period (Getty 81.AE.211)[101] name five Giants: Pankrates against Heracles,[102] Polybotes against Zeus,[103] Oranion against Dionysus,[104] Euboios and Euphorbus fallen[105] and Ephialtes.

An amphora from Caere from later in the sixth century, gives the names of more Giants: Hyperbios and Agasthenes (along with Ephialtes) fighting Zeus, Harpolykos against Hera, Enceladus against Athena and (again) Polybotes, who in this case battles Poseidon with his trident holding the island of Nisyros on his shoulder (Louvre E732).

On one side of the cup is the same central group of gods (minus Gaia) as described above: Zeus wielding his thunderbolt, stepping into a quadriga, Heracles with lion skin (behind the chariot rather than on it) drawing his (unseen) bow and, ahead, Athena thrusting her spear into a fallen Giant.

[125] With the beginning of the fourth century BC probably comes the first portrayal of the Giants in Greek art as anything other than fully human in form, with legs that become coiled serpents having snake heads at the ends in place of feet.

[144] The Gigantomachy can also be seen as a continuation of the struggle between Gaia (Mother Earth) and Uranus (Father Sky), and thus as part of the primal opposition between female and male.

[149] The rationalist Epicurean poet Lucretius, for whom such things as lightning, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions had natural rather than divine causes, used the Gigantomachy to celebrate the victory of philosophy over mythology and superstition.

[152] Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, describes mankind's moral decline through the ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron, and presents the Gigantomachy as a part of that same descent from natural order into chaos.

[155] Valerius Flaccus, in his Argonautica, makes frequent use of Gigantomachy imagery, with the Argo (the world's first ship) constituting a Gigantomachy-like offense against natural law, and example of hubristic excess.

[156] Claudian, the fourth-century AD court poet of emperor Honorius, composed a Gigantomachia that viewed the battle as a metaphor for vast geomorphic change: "The puissant company of the giants confounds all differences between things; islands abandon the deep; mountains lie hidden in the sea.

[164] Describing the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Cassius Dio relates accounts of the appearance of many Giant-like creatures on the mountain and in the surrounding area followed by violent earthquakes and the final cataclysmic eruption, saying "some thought that the Giants were rising again in revolt (for at this time also many of their forms could be discerned in the smoke and, moreover, a sound as of trumpets was heard)".