Thoon

Bronze makes a particular sound when it comes down on something living, and on the plain at Phlegrae that sound was everywhere. Burning oaks fell out of the sky. The air smelled of scorched pitch and turned earth. Into the middle of it walked three women who had no business being there, carrying maces, and one of the things they killed was called Thoon.

That is very nearly the whole of him.

Everything the ancient world kept about this Giant fits inside one clause of one book. Pseudo-Apollodorus, working through the war between the gods and the Gigantes casualty by casualty, reaches the end of his roll and writes that the Moirai, fighting with bronze clubs, killed Agrios and Thoon. Then the sentence moves on to Zeus and his thunderbolts. There is no father named for him beyond the father of all his brothers, no boast, no earlier deed, no burial. He exists in Greek myth as a name attached to a manner of dying.

The name itself is the one thing that carries any weight. Θόων comes from θοός, swift, and it was a common heroic name. Homer kills off four different Thoons across the Iliad and the Odyssey: a Trojan son of Phaenops, another Trojan at the Achaean wall, a Lycian who followed Sarpedon, and a Phaeacian at the games held for Odysseus. Nonnus adds one more in the army of Dionysus. So the Giant is neither the only Thoon nor the best attested, and some manuscripts of Apollodorus give his name as Thoas instead, which muddies matters further. The Swift One, brought down by the slowest and most patient creditors in the entire pantheon. The Greeks had a taste for that kind of joke.

Where he came from depends on which poet is telling it. Hesiod places the Gigantes at the very beginning, born out of an act of violence: when Kronos cut his father Ouranos and the blood fell on Gaia, she brought forth the Erinyes, the ash-tree nymphs called Meliae, and the Giants, who arrived already in gleaming armour with long spears in their hands. Apollodorus tells it differently. In his version Gaia bore the Gigantes out of rage at what Zeus had done to the Titans, with Ouranos as their father, in a place he says was either Phlegrae or Pallene. Both accounts agree on the part that matters. These were not creatures who grew into hostility. They were made hostile.

Nothing survives that individuates Thoon’s body. Apollodorus describes the whole race and leaves it there: unsurpassed in size, unconquerable in strength, frightening to look at, hair sweeping down from head and chin, the lower limbs sheathed in serpent scales. Even that picture is a late one. The earliest Greek painters gave the Giants no snake legs at all and drew them much as Hesiod described them, armoured infantry with spears and shields, man-shaped and merely enormous. The scaled coils belong to the Hellenistic imagination, the version carved in high relief around the great altar at Pergamon. Somewhere between those two conventions stands the figure this name belonged to, and the record declines to say which.

His ordinary work was his brothers’ work. Pick up a rock the weight of a threshing floor, or an oak still burning at the crown, and throw it at the sky. Hour after hour of it, the resin spitting, the heat of the trunk coming through the palms, the shoulder rolling into the throw. The Gigantes conducted their siege of heaven entirely with the furniture of the earth.

It should have worked. There was an oracle among the gods that they could not destroy a single Giant by themselves and would need a mortal ally to finish the work. Gaia understood exactly what that meant and went looking for a drug that would shield her sons even from mortal hands. Zeus got there first. He forbade Dawn, Moon and Sun to shine, found the herb in the dark, and cut it himself. Then Athena went and fetched Herakles.

What followed reads like a list of executions, each god reaching for the tool that suited them. Apollo put an arrow through Ephialtes’ left eye and Herakles through the right. Dionysus killed Eurytos with a thyrsus. Hecate burned Klytios down with torches. Hephaestus threw molten iron at Mimas. Athena flung the island of Sicily after Enkelados as he ran, and stripped the skin from Pallas to wear as armour. Poseidon chased Polybotes across the water and broke a piece off the island of Kos to crush him with. Hermes put on the helmet of Hades and killed Hippolytos where nobody could see him do it. Artemis took Aigaion. And then the Moirai, who spin the thread and measure it and cut it, and who as a rule never lay a hand on a weapon, came forward with maces of bronze and beat Agrios and Thoon into the ground.

The strangeness of that is easy to walk past. The Fates are not combatants. Hesiod gives them two different parentages, daughters of Night in one passage and daughters of Zeus and Themis in another, and the contradiction carries a meaning: fate is older than the gods and also an instrument of their order. Either way they work at a distance, by allotment. The only other moment Apollodorus puts them anywhere near the fighting is against Typhon on Mount Nysa, and there they do not strike him at all. They lie to him. They offer him ephemeral fruits and promise the fruits will make him stronger, and he eats. That is their usual register. With Thoon they simply hit him until he stopped.

His powers were the powers of his kind, and they were not small. He was born armed, proof against any god acting alone, strong enough to use landscape as ammunition and tall enough to make the attempt sensible. His weaknesses were the ones that ran through every Giant on that field: the loophole in the oracle, the herb his mother never got to pick, and a mortal archer walking the ground afterwards. Apollodorus is specific about that last detail. Herakles went among the fallen and sent an arrow into each of them as they lay dying. Even the two the Fates had clubbed still needed a human hand to close the account.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Thoon in Greek mythology?

Thoon was one of the Gigantes, the giant sons of Gaia who made war on the Olympian gods. He is named in only one surviving ancient source, the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, which records his death during the Gigantomachy. Nothing else about him has come down from antiquity: no parentage beyond that of the Giants as a whole, no separate myth, no cult.

How did Thoon die?

Thoon was beaten to death with bronze clubs by the Moirai, the three Fates, who killed him alongside a second Giant named Agrios. Apollodorus adds that Herakles then shot arrows into the fallen Giants as they lay dying, because an oracle had declared that the gods could not destroy a Giant without the help of a mortal.

Why did the Fates fight in the Gigantomachy?

No source explains it. The Moirai normally act by allotting destiny rather than by fighting, and the Gigantomachy is the only battle in which Apollodorus puts weapons in their hands. The one other time he places them in the conflict, against Typhon on Mount Nysa, they use deception instead, tricking him into eating ephemeral fruits on the promise that the fruits would strengthen him.

Is Thoon the same as Thoas?

Yes. Some manuscripts of Apollodorus give the Giant’s name as Thoas rather than Thoon, and modern translations differ accordingly. The name derives from the Greek word thoos, meaning swift, and it was carried by several unrelated figures in Greek myth, including four different mortals killed in Homer and a soldier in the Indian campaign of Dionysus.

What did Thoon look like?

No source describes Thoon individually. Apollodorus describes the Gigantes as a group: enormous, frightening in appearance, with long hair falling from their heads and chins and serpent scales covering their lower limbs. Earlier Greek art instead shows the Giants as armoured warriors carrying spears, so the serpent-legged version is a later convention rather than the original one.

Related Entries

Gigantes, Gaia, Uranus, Zeus, Athena, Heracles (Hercules), Hecate, Dionysus, Typhon, Erinyes (Furies), Ananke, Antaeus, Otus and Ephialtes, Geryon, Argus Panoptes