Giants in Greek mythology: the sons of Gaia who fought the gods in the Gigantomachy

The Giants (Gigantes) are, in Greek mythology, a race of warriors born of Gaia, the Earth, from the blood of Uranus after Cronus castrated him. Their defining myth is the Gigantomachy, the war they waged against the gods of Olympus once Zeus had defeated the Titans. Because an oracle declared that the gods could not beat them without a mortal ally, Zeus called in Heracles. The Giants are not the Titans, nor the Hundred-Handers, nor the Cyclopes: together with Typhon, they are Earth’s last challenge to the Olympian order.

Born from the blood of Uranus

The Giants’ birth belongs to the Greek creation myth. In the Theogony (183-187), Hesiod tells how, when Cronus cut off his father’s genitals with the sickle Gaia had given him, drops of blood fell on the Earth. Over the turning years she bore the Erinyes, the Meliae (nymphs of the ash trees) and “the great Giants, gleaming in armor, holding long spears in their hands”.

That passage settles three things. The Giants are sons of Gaia, with Uranus as their indirect father; they are born armed, as warriors; and they are siblings of the Erinyes, powers of vengeance born from the same crime. Hesiod says almost nothing else. He tells no Gigantomachy, and mentions the Giants only once more, at line 50, among the subjects the Muses sing alongside the race of men.

Apollodorus (Library 1.6.1) gives a later and more tightly plotted version: angry at what had happened to the Titans, Gaia bore the Giants to Uranus to avenge them. That motive makes the Gigantomachy a direct sequel to the Titanomachy.

Homer’s Giants: a lost people

In Homer, the Giants do not fight the gods. They are an ancient, overbearing people. In the Odyssey (7.56-60), the Phaeacian king Alcinous descends from a daughter of Eurymedon, “who once ruled over the arrogant Giants” and led his reckless people to destruction. Later (7.205-206), the Phaeacians say they are close to the gods, as are the Cyclopes and the wild tribes of Giants. And the Laestrygonians look “not like men, but like Giants” (10.120).

This Homeric picture of an outsized human race destroyed by its own excess survives alongside the cosmic war version for a long time.

The Gigantomachy

The battlefield: Phlegra

Pindar sets the battle at Phlegra, the “burning land”, in Nemean 1 (67-72). The Library transmitted under Apollodorus’ name (1.6.1) reports two traditions about the Giants’ birthplace: Phlegra according to some, Pallene according to others. Herodotus (7.123) explains that the Pallene peninsula in Chalcidice used to be called Phlegra. Diodorus Siculus (4.21), on the other hand, sets Heracles’ fight with the Giants on the Phlegraean plain near Cumae in Campania, a volcanic landscape whose smoking ground seemed to preserve the scars of the thunderbolt.

The oracle and Gaia’s herb

According to Apollodorus (1.6.1), the gods received an oracle: they could not destroy any Giant on their own, only with the help of a mortal. Gaia then went looking for a herb, a pharmakon, that would make her sons safe even from a mortal. Zeus got there first. He forbade Eos, Selene and Helios to shine, cut the plant himself in the dark, and had Athena summon Heracles.

The point is crucial: Olympus wins because of a hero born mortal. It is one of the stories that justify Heracles’ later admission among the gods. Pindar had already foretold it in Nemean 1 (67-72), where the seer Tiresias prophesies that Heracles, fighting beside the gods on the plain of Phlegra, will bring down the Giants and foul their shining hair with dust under his arrows.

The gods and Heracles against the Giants

Apollodorus gives a list of duels that reads like a description of a sculpted frieze:

• Alcyoneus, one of the two leaders, cannot die while he fights on the land of his birth. Heracles shoots him, then, on Athena’s advice, drags him beyond Pallene, where he dies.
• Porphyrion, the other leader, attacks Heracles and Hera. Zeus fills him with lust for the goddess; as he tears her robes, Zeus strikes him with a thunderbolt and Heracles finishes him off.
• Ephialtes takes an arrow from Apollo in the left eye and one from Heracles in the right.
• Eurytus falls to the thyrsus of Dionysus, Clytius to the torches of Hecate, Mimas to the red-hot metal hurled by Hephaestus.
• Enceladus runs; Athena throws the island of Sicily on top of him. She flays Pallas and uses his skin to shield her own body.
• Polybotes, chased across the sea by Poseidon, reaches Cos; the god breaks off a piece of the island, Nisyros, and crushes him under it.
• Hermes, wearing the helmet of Hades, kills Hippolytus; Artemis kills Gration; the Fates strike down Agrius and Thoon with bronze clubs.

The rest are blasted by Zeus’ thunderbolts, and Heracles shoots them all as they fall.

How the versions differ

The sources disagree about names, opponents and place.

• Pindar, in Pythian 8 (12-18), makes Porphyrion king of the Giants, overcome by Zeus’ thunderbolt and Apollo’s arrows, and pairs him with Typhon. In Isthmian 6 (31-35), Heracles and Telamon kill the huge Alcyoneus, an episode not necessarily tied to the Gigantomachy.
• Euripides, in Ion (205-218), describes the Gigantomachy carved at Delphi: Athena raises her Gorgon shield against Enceladus, Zeus blasts Mimas, Dionysus kills another son of Earth with his thyrsus. In Cyclops (5-9), Silenus boasts that he speared Enceladus while fighting beside Dionysus: the same victim, a different killer.
• Apollodorus gives Mimas to Hephaestus, where Euripides had given him to Zeus.
• Ovid (Metamorphoses 1.151-162) has the Giants pile up mountains to climb to heaven. In the Odyssey (11.305-320), that feat belonged to the Aloadae, Otus and Ephialtes, who wanted to stack Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa. Ovid adds that Earth made a violent race of men from the Giants’ blood.

From hoplites to serpent legs

The look of the Giants changed a great deal. Archaic art, following Hesiod, shows them as helmeted hoplites with shield and spear, barely taller than the gods, as on the north frieze of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, around 525 BCE. The Gigantomachy also filled the east metopes of the Parthenon, and it was traditionally woven into the peplos offered to Athena at the Panathenaea, as Plato recalls in the Euthyphro (6b-c).

Serpent-shaped legs appear in Greek art in the fourth century BCE and become common in the Hellenistic period. Apollodorus describes Giants with long hair and beards and feet covered in dragon scales. The great frieze of the Pergamon Altar, in the second century BCE, includes serpent-legged and winged Giants alongside figures with human proportions. These forms coexist: neither colossal size nor serpent legs define every depiction of the Giants.

A political and philosophical myth

The Gigantomachy was a way of saying that order beats excess. In Athens, the peplos and the Parthenon tied the city’s goddess to that triumph; at Pergamon, the Attalid kings used it to celebrate their victories over the Galatians. Philosophers were wary of it. Xenophanes (fr. 1) wanted no songs at a symposium about the battles of Titans, Giants and Centaurs, “fictions of earlier men”, and Plato (Republic 2.378c) would have barred poets from telling children about Gigantomachies or wars among the gods.

The myth also has a geography. Volcanoes and scorched ground in Campania, Sicily and the Aegean were taken to be the Giants’ graves: Enceladus under Etna in Virgil (Aeneid 3.578-582), Polybotes under Nisyros. Like Typhon, they become the underground memory of the war Earth lost.

What the ancient sources say

• Hesiod (Theogony 183-187) has the Giants spring from Uranus’ blood on Gaia, armed with spears, siblings of the Erinyes and the Meliae.
• Homer (Odyssey 7 and 10) knows a people of arrogant Giants ruled by Eurymedon and destroyed.
• Pindar (Nemean 1, Pythian 8, Isthmian 6) links Heracles to the victory at Phlegra and names Porphyrion and Alcyoneus.
• Euripides (Ion, Cyclops) describes the Delphi frieze and credits Enceladus’ death to Athena in one play, to Silenus in another.
• Apollodorus (1.6.1-2) gives the fullest account: the oracle, Gaia’s herb and the named duels.
• Diodorus (4.21) and Herodotus (7.123) locate Phlegra in Campania or Chalcidice.
• Virgil and Ovid fix the Latin images of Enceladus under Etna and the piled mountains.

Further reading

For the Giants’ birth, read the Greek creation myth and the profiles of their parents, Gaia and Uranus. The previous war is told in the Titanomachy, and Earth’s final assault in the profile of Typhon. For Uranus’ other giant children, see the Hundred-Handers and the Cyclopes. The parts played by Heracles and Athena are covered in their own profiles, and the weapon that decided the battle in Zeus’ thunderbolt. For the wider picture, start from the Greek mythology hub.