Hecatoncheires

The Hecatoncheires were born to Gaia, the primordial Earth, and Uranus, the vast Sky that arched above her. Their birth was the first act of procreation in the cosmos, and it was a birth that filled their father with terror. Each of the three brothers -- Briareus, whose name means "The Vigorous"; Cottus, whose name means "The Striker" or "The Furious"; and Gyges, whose name means "The Big-Limbed" -- emerged with fifty heads upon their shoulders and one hundred arms sprouting from their torsos, each arm strong enough to lift a mountain. Their companion brothers, the Cyclopes -- Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, the one-eyed smiths who forged thunder for Zeus -- were born in the same generation. But where the Cyclopes were craftsmen, the Hecatoncheires were pure, unbridled force. Uranus, the Sky, looked upon his children and saw not sons but threats. He seized them and forced them back into the womb of Gaia, burying them in the dark depths of the earth where they could not challenge his rule. Gaia groaned in agony, her body stretched and torn by the imprisonment of her own children, and she began to plot the downfall of her husband.

When Cronus, the youngest and wiliest of the Titans, rose up against his father Uranus with the great sickle forged by Gaia, he castrated the Sky and cast the severed genitals into the sea. But Cronus proved no better a father than Uranus had been. Fearing a prophecy that one of his own children would overthrow him, Cronus swallowed each infant as it was born -- Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Poseidon, and Hades -- until only Zeus, hidden away on the island of Crete, escaped. When Zeus grew to manhood and forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings, the war for the cosmos began. The Titanomachy raged for ten years, neither side gaining advantage, the earth shaking and the heavens trembling with the clash of divine armies. It was then that Gaia, who had never forgotten her buried children, whispered to Zeus the secret of victory. She told him that the Hecatoncheires and the Cyclopes lay imprisoned in Tartarus, the deepest pit beneath the earth, guarded by the monstrous she-dragon Campe. If Zeus could free them, they would fight for him. Zeus descended into the abyss, slew Campe, and broke the chains that bound the giants. The Cyclopes forged for him the thunderbolt, for Poseidon the trident, and for Hades the helmet of invisibility. The Hecatoncheires needed no weapons -- their own bodies were arsenals enough.

The battle that followed was unlike any the cosmos had seen. The three Hecatoncheires took their places at the forefront of Zeus's army, and when the signal was given, each giant seized one hundred massive boulders -- mountains torn from the earth -- and hurled them at the Titan ranks. Three hundred rocks flew through the air at once, a storm of stone that blotted out the sun and shattered the defenses of the elder gods. The Titans, mighty as they were, could not withstand the barrage. They fell beneath the avalanche, buried and broken, and Zeus drove them down into Tartarus, the pit from which the Hecatoncheires themselves had been freed. There the giants were appointed as eternal wardens, their hundred arms holding fast the bronze gates, their fifty heads watching every approach. Poseidon, the god of the sea, was so grateful for their service that he gave his daughter Cymopoleia, whose name means "Wave-Walker," in marriage to Briareus, binding the giants to the Olympian family by blood. The poet Hesiod, who sang of these events in his Theogony, declared that the Hecatoncheires stood as "trusty warders of Zeus who holds the aegis," and that their vigilance ensured the Titans would never again threaten the order of the gods.

In another tale, the giant Briareus alone left his post to intervene in the affairs of the gods upon Olympus. The sea goddess Thetis, a Nereid nymph of the ocean depths, summoned him when a conspiracy threatened to overthrow Zeus himself. Hera, the queen of the gods and Zeus's wife; Poseidon, the god of the sea and Zeus's brother; and Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, had plotted together to bind the king of the gods in chains. They seized Zeus while he slept and would have imprisoned him, but Thetis heard the commotion and flew to the ends of the earth to find Briareus. The hundred-handed giant rose from his watch at the gates of Tartarus and strode into the halls of Olympus, his fifty heads turning in every direction, his hundred arms flexing with terrible strength. The conspirators froze in terror at the sight of him. No god dared oppose a creature who could seize a hundred enemies at once, and the rebellion collapsed without a blow struck. Briareus took his place beside Zeus as a living bodyguard, and the king of the gods was freed. Homer, the blind poet who sang of the Trojan War, recorded that the gods called this giant Briareus, but mortal men knew him by another name: Aegaeon, the Mighty One, a name that echoed across the Aegean Sea.

The Hecatoncheires appear rarely in the myths that follow the fall of the Titans, for their role was too vast and too terrible for the smaller stories of heroes and monsters. Yet their presence lingered in the Greek imagination as the ultimate expression of raw, overwhelming force. The philosopher Plato, in his dialogue the Laws, wrote that the Hecatoncheires served as a model for the ideal military formation -- a body of soldiers so numerous and so disciplined that no enemy could break through. The Roman poet Virgil placed Briareus beneath Mount Etna in Sicily, bound in chains by the very earth he had helped shape, his struggles causing the volcano to smoke and tremble. Dante Alighieri, writing over a thousand years later, encountered Briareus in the ninth circle of Hell, a giant frozen in ice alongside other rebels against divine order. In modern astronomy, the name "Hecatoncheires" has been given to a moon of Saturn, a frozen world circling the planet of the Roman god who was the Greek Poseidon's counterpart -- a silent reminder of the giants who once shook the cosmos with their hundred hands.