ENRAGED because Zeus had confined their brothers, the Titans, in Tartarus, certain tall and terrible giants, with long locks and beards, and serpent-tails for feet, plotted an assault on Heaven. They had been born from Mother Earth at Thracian Phlegra, twenty-four in number.
c. The Olympians could now join battle with the giants. Heracles let loose his first arrow against Alcyoneus, the enemy’s leader. He fell to the ground, but sprang up again revived, because this was his native soil of Phlegra. ‘Quick, noble Heracles!’ cried Athene. ‘Drag him away to another country!’ Heracles caught Alcyoneus up on his shoulders, and dragged him over the Thracian border, where he despatched him with a club.
d. Then Porphyrion leaped into Heaven from the great pyramid of rocks which the giants had piled up, and none of the gods stood his ground. Only Athene adopted a posture of defence. Rushing by her, Porphyrion made for Hera, whom he tried to strangle; but, wounded in the liver by a timely arrow from Eros’s bow, he turned from anger to lust, and ripped off Hera’s glorious robe. Zeus, seeing that his wife was about to be outraged, ran forward in jealous wrath, and felled Porphyrion with a thunderbolt. Up he sprang again, but Heracles, returning to Phlegra in the nick of time, mortally wounded him with an arrow. Meanwhile, Ephialtes had engaged Ares and beaten him to his knees; however, Apollo shot the wretch in the left eye and called to Heracles, who at once planted another arrow in the rib. Thus died Ephialtes.
e. Now, wherever a god wounded a giant-as when Dionysus felled Eurytus with his thyrsus, or Hecate singed Clytius with torches, or Hephaestus scalded Mimas with a ladle of red-hot metal, Athene crushed the lustful Pallas with a stone, it was Heracles who had to deal the death blow. The peace-loving goddesses Hestia and Demeter took no part in the conflict, but stood dismayed, wringing their hands to the Fates, however, swung brazen pestles to good effect.
f. Discouraged, the remaining giants fled back to earth, pursued by the Olympians. Athene threw a vast missile at Enceladus, who crushed him flat and became the island of Sicily. And Poseidon brought off part of Cos with his trident and threw it at Polybutes; this became the nearby islet of Nisyros, beneath which he lies buried.
g. The remaining giants made a last stand at Bathos, near Arcadian Trapezus, where the ground still burns, and giants’ bones are sometimes turned up by plough-men. Hermes, borrowing Hades’s helmet of invisibility, struck down Hippolytus, and Artemis pierced Gration with an arrow; while the Fates’ pestles broke the heads of Agrius and Thoas. Ares, with his spear, and Zeus, with his thunderbolt, are accounted for the rest, though Heracles was called upon to despatch each giant as he fell. But some say that the battle took place on Phlegraean Plain, near Cumae in Italy.
h. Silenus, the earth-born Satyr, claims to have taken part in battle at the side of his pupil Dionysus, killing Enceladus and spread panic among the giants by the braying of his old pack-ass; but Silenus is usually drunken and cannot distinguish truth from falsehood.
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1. This is a post-Homeric story, preserved in a degenerate version: Eros and Dionysus, who take part in the fighting, are late-comer Olympus, and Heracles is admitted there before apotheosis on Mount Oeta. It purports to account for finding of mammoth bones at Trapezus (where they are still shown in a local museum); and for the volcanic fires at Bathos near by- also at Arcadian, or Thracian, Pallene, at Cumae, and in the islands of Sicily and Nisyros, beneath which Athene and Poseidon are said to have buried two of the giants.
2. The historical incident underlying the Giants’ Revolt-and also the Aloeids’ Revolt, of which it is usually regarded as a double-seems to be a concerted attempt by non-Hellenic mountaineers to storm certain Hellenic fortresses, and their repulse by the Hellenes’ subject- allies. But the powerlessness and cowardice of the gods, contrasted with the invincibility of Heracles, and the farcical incidents of the battle, are more characteristic of popular fiction than of myth.
3. There is, however, a hidden religious element in the story. These giants are not flesh and blood, but earth-born spirits, as their serpent-tails prove, and can be thwarted only by the possession of a magical herb. No mythographer mentions the name of the herb, but it was probably the ephialtion, a specific against the nightmare. Ephialtes, the name of the giants’ leader, means literally ‘he who leaps upon’ (incubus in Latin); and the attempts of Porphyrion to strangle and rape Hera, and of Pallas to rape Athene, suggest that the story mainly concerns the wisdom of invoking Heracles the Saviour, when threatened by erotic nightmares at any hour of the twenty-four.
4. Alcyoneus (‘mighty ass’) is probably the spirit of the sirocco, ‘the breath of the Wild Ass’, or Typhon, which brings bad dreams, and murderous inclinations, and rapes; and this makes Silenus’s claim to have routed the giants with the braying of his pack-ass still more ridiculous. Mimas (‘mimicry’) may refer to the delusive verisimilitude of dreams; and Hippolytus (‘stampede of horses') recalls the ancient attribution of terror-dreams to the Mare- headed goddess. In the north, it was Odin whom sufferers from ‘the Nightmare and her ninefold’ invoked, until his place was taken by St. Swithold.
5. What use Heracles made of the herb can be deduced from the Babylonian myth of the cosmic fight between the new gods and the old. There Marduk, Heracles’s counterpart, holds a herb to his nostrils against the noxious smell of the goddess Tiamat; here Alcyoneus’s breath has to be counteracted.
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