Hecatoncheires

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Hecatoncheires were three giants so extreme in their form that the ancient Greeks had to invent a new word to name them. Each had fifty heads and one hundred arms. Their collective title comes from the Greek hekaton, meaning "hundred", and cheir, meaning "hand" or "arm". They were called Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges, and the standard tradition makes them the children of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth). What did these creatures actually do in the myths? Why do different ancient sources describe them fighting on opposite sides of the same war? And what does their tangled relationship with the sea god Poseidon reveal about the deeper, older layers of Greek religion that lie beneath the familiar stories?

• 2. Three Names, Three Giants

  ›

  Cottus takes his name from a common Thracian root, and some scholars link it to the Thracian goddess Kotys. His name marks him as something from the edges of the Greek world, a creature absorbed from a neighbouring culture. Briareus was probably formed from the Greek word brioros, meaning "strong", and Hesiod's Theogony also calls him "Obriareus", suggesting the name had an alternate form that circulated in early tradition. The third brother, Gyges, carries a name possibly related to the mythical Attic king Ogyges, and some ancient texts prefer the variant "Gyes" instead.

  Briareus is described in Hesiod's Theogony as singled out for being "good", a moral distinction that sets him apart from his brothers and earns him a special reward. In the Iliad, Homer gives him a second name entirely: the gods call him Briareus, while mortals call him Aegaeon. The root of that mortal name, aig-, appears in Greek words for the shore and for waves. It points directly toward the sea, and toward a figure who may have been something other than a loyal giant before later poets reshaped him.

  Homer's division of divine and mortal names for the same being is not a casual detail. The legendary seventh-century BC poet Cinaethon apparently knew both names, and the name Aegaeon also appears in the lost epic the Titanomachy. This suggests the dual naming was part of a genuine, old tradition, not a Homeric flourish.

• 3. Imprisoned, Then Unleashed

  ›

  Uranus hated the Hundred-Handers as soon as they were born. The Theogony describes how he forced them underground, binding them far beneath the earth, where they sat at the limits of the world "suffering greatly for a long time, with much grief in their hearts." They were, along with the three Cyclopes, the last of the eighteen children of Uranus and Gaia to be born, according to Hesiod, though the mythographer Apollodorus contradicts this and makes them the first.

  Gaia eventually drove her son Cronus to castrate Uranus, ending his tyranny, but the Hundred-Handers remained imprisoned. Cronus swallowed his own children in turn, and it was only when Zeus, saved by his mother Rhea and raised by Gaia, freed his siblings and launched the Titanomachy that the Hundred-Handers' release became a military necessity. Gaia had foretold that Zeus would be victorious only if the Hundred-Handers fought alongside him. Zeus went down to them and restored their strength with nectar and ambrosia before asking them to "manifest your great strength and your untouchable hands."

  Cottus spoke for the three brothers, and his reply in the Theogony is one of the most direct speeches in early Greek epic: they had given up hope of ever leaving the dark; now, in return for Zeus, they pledged to fight the Titans in "mighty combats." What followed was a battle of enormous boulders. The three brothers hurled three hundred rocks in sequence, overshadowing the Titans with their missiles and driving them down into Tartarus, where the Hundred-Handers then took up the role of permanent warders.

• 4. The Other Tradition

  ›

  The lost epic the Titanomachy, attributed by ancient sources to Eumelus, a semi-legendary poet from Corinth, told apparently a very different version of the same war. Though it was probably composed after Hesiod's Theogony, scholars believe it preserved an older strand of the myth. In the Titanomachy, Aegaeon was not the son of Uranus and Gaia but of Gaia and Pontus (Sea), and he fought on the side of the Titans, not the Olympians.

  The first-century BC Latin poet Virgil drew on this same tradition in his Aeneid. He describes Aegaeon fighting against the gods, equipped with fifty sounding shields and fifty swords, breathing fire from fifty mouths and fifty breasts. Ovid, writing in the same era, follows the Titanomachy version in his Fasti: after the Titans were overthrown, Briareus sacrificed a bull with an adamantine axe, attempting to burn its entrails in a ritual that, according to prophecy, would allow whoever completed it to conquer the gods. At the crucial moment, birds sent by Jupiter snatched the entrails away, and as a reward were given a home among the stars.

  The scholiast on Apollonius of Rhodes adds one more detail from Cinaethon: in this version, Aegaeon was defeated by Poseidon himself. And the physical evidence of that defeat survives in the Argonautica: Apollonius of Rhodes places the "great tomb of Aegaeon" at a location the Argonauts pass near the mouth of the Rhyndacus, a short distance beyond Phrygia.

• 5. A Sea God in Disguise

  ›

  Briareus and Aegaeon may originally have been separate entities entirely, one a primordial earth-born giant, the other a many-armed sea monster. The connection between Aegaeon and the sea runs through nearly every text that mentions him. In Hesiod's Theogony, Briareus ends up living with Cymopolea, the daughter of Poseidon, while the Iliad implies he lives in the sea because it is the sea goddess Thetis who fetches him to Olympus when Zeus needs protection.

  The fifth-century BC poet Ion of Chios made the connection explicit. Referring to the Iliad's account of the revolt against Zeus, Ion said that Aegaeon was the son of Thalassa (Sea) and that Thetis "summoned him from the Ocean." Later writers reinforced this further. According to Aelian, Aristotle himself stated that the Pillars of Heracles, the strait we call Gibraltar, had once been known as the Pillars of Briareus. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid describes Aegaeon as a "dark-hued" sea god "whose strong arms can overpower huge whales." According to Arrian, the Aegean Sea itself was said to have been named after Aegaeon. And as reported by Pliny, the Euboean writer Archemachus credited Aegaeon as the first person ever to sail a long ship.

  Briareus had a particular relationship with the island of Euboea. The third-century Latin grammarian Solinus records that Briareus was worshipped at Carystus and Aegaeon at Chalcis. The island's own name, according to one tradition, derived from Euboea, the daughter of Briareus. A Corinthian legend, reported by the second-century geographer Pausanias, adds yet another civic function: Briareus served as the arbitrator in a dispute between Poseidon and Helios over land, awarding the Isthmus of Corinth to Poseidon and the acropolis of Corinth to Helios.

• 6. Poseidon's Shadow

  ›

  The scholar Lewis Richard Farnell argued that Poseidon likely inherited the title Aegaeon from an "older Euboean sea-giant." The evidence is circumstantial but persistent. Poseidon was himself sometimes called Aegaeon or Aegaeus. Homer places Poseidon's palace in a location called Aegae, which Strabo later situates in Euboea, north of Chalcis, as a site where Poseidon had a temple. Briareus becomes Poseidon's son-in-law in the Theogony, while the mortal name Aegaeon could be read as a patronymic meaning "son of Aegaeus", which is itself a title for Poseidon.

  If Farnell's reading is correct, Briareus/Aegaeon was a pre-Greek sea deity who was gradually absorbed into the mythology of the Olympians, first as a rival, then as a subordinate ally, and finally as a family member. Some scholars have drawn a parallel to the Ugaritic myth in which Yammu, the sea, battles the storm-god Baal. That older Near Eastern pattern, in which the sea represents an elemental chaotic force eventually subdued by a sky or storm deity, may lie behind the Greek myth of the Hundred-Handers in some of its earliest forms.

  Briareus also accumulated stories that echo the god Hephaestus. The third-century BC poet Callimachus describes him buried under Mount Etna in Sicily, and says his shifting position causes earthquakes. An Oxyrhynchus papyrus records the claim that "the first to use metal armour was Briareos, whilst previously men protected their bodies with animal skins." These details together suggest that at some point in the tradition, Briareus was imagined as a subterranean smith, using Etna's volcanic fires as his forge.

• 7. Later Echoes

  ›

  Dante Alighieri placed Briareus twice in his Divine Comedy, completed in 1320: first as a giant dwelling in the Ninth Circle of Hell, and again on the first terrace of Purgatory, where his image is carved into the pavement as an example of pride. Miguel de Cervantes mentions him in Chapter 8 of Don Quixote, comparing Briareus's arms to the whirling sails of a windmill that Don Quixote charges as an enemy. Cervantes was likely drawing on Virgil, Dante, and Giulio Romano's paintings of the Fall of the Giants.

  The fifth-century AD Greek poet Nonnus, writing in his Dionysiaca, describes Briareus with his "ready hands" and Aegaeon as the "protector of Zeus' laws." The philosopher Plato, writing centuries earlier in his Laws, used Briareus as a thought experiment: if a soldier were as gifted as Briareus, with his hundred hands, he ought to train with all one hundred. The Hundred-Handers had become a unit of measurement for imagining what extreme power might look like. Horace, in two separate poems, uses Gyges as an example of terrifying strength paired with divine hostility, placing him alongside the Chimaera as a creature of dread.

  The name Hecatoncheires itself appears in none of the oldest texts. Hesiod never uses it. The Iliad uses only the adjective form, hekatoncheiros, to describe Briareus. The first certain use of the collective noun Hecatoncheires comes from later mythographers such as Apollodorus, suggesting the three brothers accrued their famous group title long after the individual stories about Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges had already been told.