The Aloeids

EPHIALTES and Otus were the bastard sons of Iphimedeia, a daughter of Triops. She had fallen in love with Poseidon, and used to crouch the seashore, scooping up the waves in her hands and pouring them into her lap; thus she got herself with child. Ephialtes and Otus were, however, called the Aloeids because Iphimedeia subsequently married Aloeus, who had been made king of Boeotian Asopia by his father Helius. The Aloeids grew one cubit in breadth and one fathom height every year and, when they were nine years old, being then nine cubits broad and nine fathoms high, declared war on Olympus. Ephialtes swore by the river Styx to outrage Hera, and Otus similarly swore to outrage Artemis.

b. Deciding that Ares the God of War must be their first captured, they went to Thrace, disarmed him, bound him, and confined him to a brazen vessel, which they hid in the house of their stepmother Eriboea, Iphimedeia being now dead. Then their siege of Olympus began: they made a mound for its assault by piling Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa, and further threatened to cast mountains into the sea until it became dry land, though the lowlands were swamped by the waves. Their confidence was unquenchable because it had been prophesied that no other men, nor any gods, could kill them.

c. On Apollo’s advice, Artemis sent the Aloeids a message: if they raised their siege, she would meet them on the island of Naxos, and there submit to Otus’s embraces. Otus was overjoyed, but Ephialtes, not having received a similar message from Hera, grew jealous and angry. A cruel quarrel broke out on Naxos, where they went together: Ephialtes insisting that the terms should be rejected unless, as the elder of the two, he was the first to enjoy Artemis. The argument had reached its height, when Artemis herself appeared in the form of a white doe, and each Aloeid, seizing his javelin, made ready to prove himself the better marksman by flinging it at her. As she darted between them, swift as the wind, they let fly and each pierced the other through and through. Thus both perished, and the prophecy that they could not be killed by other men, or by gods, was justified. Their bodies were carried back for interment in Boeotian Anthedon; but the Naxians still pay them heroic honours. They are remembered also as the founders of Boeotian Astra; and as the first mortals to worship the Muses of Helicon.

d. The siege of Olympus being thus raised, Hermes went in search of Ares, and forced Eriboea to release him, half-dead, from the brazen vessel. But the souls of the Aloeids descended to Tartarus, where they were securely tied to a pillar with knotted cords of living vipers. There they sit, back to back, and the Nymph Styx perches grimly on the pillar-top, as a reminder of their unfulfilled oaths.

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1. This is another popular version of the Giants’ Revolt. The name Ephialtes, the assault  on Olympus, the threat to Hera, and the prophecy of their invulnerability, occur in both versions. Ephialtes and Otus, ‘sons of the threshing-floor’ by ‘her who strengthens the genitals’, grandsons of ‘Three Face’, namely Hecate, and worshippers of the wild Muses, personify the incubus, or orgiastic nightmare, which stifles and outrages sleeping women.  Like the Nightmare in British legend, they are associated with the number nine. The myth is confused by a shadowy historical episode reported by Diodorus Siculus. He says that Aloeus,  a Thessalian, sent his sons to liberate their mother Iphimedeia and their sister Pancratis (‘all- strength’) from the Thracians, who had carried them off to Naxos; their expedition was successful, but they quarrelled about the partition of the island and killed each other. However, though Stephanus of Byzantium records that the city of Aloeium in Thessaly was named after the Aloeids, early mythographers make them Boeotians.

2. The twins’ mutual murder recalls the eternal rivalry for the love of the White Goddess between the sacred king and his tanist, who alternately meet death at each other’s hands. That they were called ‘sons of the threshing-floor’ and escaped destruction by Zeus’s lightning, connects them with the corn cult, rather than the oak cult. Their punishment in Tartarus, like that of Theseus and Peirithous, seems to be deduced from an ancient calendar symbol showing the twins’ heads turned back to back, on either side of a column, as they sit on the Chair of Forgetfulness. The column, on which the Death-in-Life Goddess perches, marks the height of summer when the sacred king’s reign ends and the tanist’s begins. In Italy, this same symbol became two-headed Janus; but the Italian New Year was in January, not at the  heliacal rising of two-headed Sirius.

3. Ares’s imprisonment for thirteen months is an unrelated mythic fragment of uncertain date, referring perhaps to an armistice of one whole year-the Pelasgian year had thirteen months-agreed upon between the Thessalo-Boeotians and Thracians, with war-like tokens of both nations entrusted to a brazen vessel in a temple of Hera Eriboea. Pelion, Ossa, and Olympus are all mountains to the east of Thessaly, with a distant view of the Thracian Chersonese where the war terminated by this armistice may have been fought.