Gigantes

Region/Culture: Southern Europe / Ancient Greece
Mythos: Greek
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts (a race of earthborn giants)
Mythical Attributes: Immense strength and aggression, with several individual Giants holding special gifts such as conditional immortality on their native soil.
Role in Mythos: The monstrous offspring of Gaia who rose against the Olympian gods in the Gigantomachy to avenge the imprisoned Titans.
Relation to Humans: The Gigantes had little direct dealing with mortals, but their defeat hinged on one: a prophecy held that no god could kill them without the help of a human, and so Heracles was brought into the war. To later Greeks the giants buried beneath volcanoes explained the eruptions and tremors that disrupted human lives.

At Phlegra the ground split and gave up an army. They came out of the earth already grown, taller than the oaks around them, hair hanging long and matted from their heads and chins, and where a man would have had feet they dragged the scaled coils of serpents through the dirt. The air there carried the sulphur stink of a land that smoked and shifted on its own. The Giants tore boulders loose from the hillsides, set whole oaks alight to swing as torches, and turned their faces upward, because the sky was the thing they meant to climb.

They were Gaia’s children, and they were born out of an old injury. When Cronus took the flint sickle to his father Uranus and flung the severed parts away, the blood of the Sky god fell back down onto the Earth, and the Earth drank it in. From that rain she conceived the Furies, the ash-tree nymphs, and the Gigantes, a brood made out of heaven’s own wound. Some tellings make their begetting simpler and only say that Gaia bore them; one names Tartarus as their father instead. The disagreement matters less than the inheritance. Whichever way they came, they came already angry.

The anger had a cause. Gaia had watched the Olympians throw down the Titans, her elder children, and chain them in the dark under the world. The Giants were her answer. Their quarrel was a family one settled with mountains. They piled crags and ridges into a stair toward Olympus and hurled flaming trees and rocks at the heavens, and for a while the gods could not put them down, because the gods alone were not enough to do it.

That was the heart of the trouble. A prophecy ran that the Gigantes could never be killed by gods, only by a god working alongside a mortal man. Gaia heard it too, and went searching for a herb that would keep her sons safe even from a human hand. Zeus moved first. He forbade Dawn and Moon and Sun to shine, and in that imposed darkness he cut the plant himself before she could reach it. Then he had Athena fetch the one mortal who could finish the work, and Heracles came to Phlegra with his bow.

The killing of the Giants reads like a roster of single combats, each god taking the enemy suited to them. Porphyrion, one of the greatest, threw himself at Hera and tore at her robes; Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt and Heracles put an arrow in him as he reeled. Apollo shot Ephialtes through the left eye and Heracles drove a shaft through the right. Dionysus came at Eurytus with nothing grander than his ivy-wrapped staff and killed him with it. Hephaestus, the smith, hurled glowing lumps of molten metal. Hecate and the Fates waded in with torches and bronze clubs. The whole field stank of scorched hide and hot iron, and the giants who fell stayed where they dropped, because most of them could die like anything else once a man’s weapon was in the wound.

Two of them were harder. Alcyoneus could not be killed at all so long as he fought on the ground that bore him, the soil of Pallene. Heracles shot him and watched him crumple and then rise again, healed by the earth under his back. Athena saw the problem and named the answer: drag him out. Heracles hauled the giant bodily across the border of his native land, and beyond it the wound finally held and Alcyoneus died. Enceladus tried to flee, and Athena pinned him by flinging the whole island of Sicily down on top of him. He is there still, in the stories. When Etna throws fire, that is his breath forcing up through the rock; when the ground shakes, it is Enceladus turning over beneath the weight. Poseidon chased Polybotes across the sea, broke a piece off the island of Kos, and crushed him under it where it became the islet of Nisyros.

They lost. The earthborn army that had set out to take the sky ended scattered under burning hills and drowned islands, and Olympus held. The volcanic places of the Greek world, the smoking fields west of Naples that share their name, the cone of Etna, the broken islands of the Aegean, became their graveyard and the proof that they had once lived.

Their power was the plain power of the earth made enormous: bodies no ordinary force could match, the strength to throw mountains, the numbers to swarm a battlefield, and in a few of them gifts like Alcyoneus’s deathlessness on home soil. What undid them was written into the same nature. They were a mob, formidable in a charge and useless at anything subtler, and the prophecy that protected the gods became the giants’ undoing instead. They could be dragged off their own ground until their advantage failed. They could be blinded by an arrow each from two directions. Against aimed divine fire and a mortal’s patient bow, all that earthborn bulk had no reply, and the thing they had been made to overthrow buried them instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Gigantes in Greek mythology?

The Gigantes are a race of enormous, aggressive giants in Greek mythology, born from the Earth goddess Gaia. They are best known for the Gigantomachy, their failed war against the Olympian gods. In the most widely cited descriptions they have long hair, fierce faces, and serpents’ coils in place of legs.

How were the Gigantes born?

According to Hesiod, the Gigantes sprang from Gaia (Earth) after Cronus castrated the sky god Uranus and his blood fell upon the ground, impregnating her. The same spilled blood also produced the Furies and the ash-tree nymphs. Some later accounts simply say Gaia bore them, and one tradition names Tartarus as their father.

What was the Gigantomachy?

The Gigantomachy was the great battle between the Gigantes and the Olympian gods. Enraged that the Olympians had imprisoned her elder children the Titans, Gaia sent the Giants to storm Mount Olympus by piling up mountains and hurling rocks and burning trees. The gods defeated them, but only with the help of the mortal hero Heracles.

Why did the gods need Heracles to defeat the Gigantes?

A prophecy declared that the Gigantes could not be slain by the gods alone, but only with the aid of a mortal. To secure that help, Zeus blocked out the sun, moon, and dawn so he could harvest a protective herb before Gaia found it, then sent Athena to bring Heracles into the war, whose arrows proved decisive.

How were the Gigantes killed?

Each Olympian killed the Giant matched to them, often finished off by Heracles’s arrows: Zeus and Heracles brought down Porphyrion, Apollo and Heracles blinded Ephialtes, and Dionysus killed Eurytus with his staff. The giant Alcyoneus, immortal on his native soil, died only after Heracles dragged him beyond its borders, while Enceladus was buried under Sicily and Polybotes under the island of Nisyros.