The Gigantes, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

When Cronus had cut Uranus with the sickle and the blood of the wounded sky-god had fallen upon the earth, Gaia received it; and from those drops there sprang up a race of monstrous beings called the Gigantes — the Giants, the Earthborn — vast of stature, with the legs of serpents and hair and beards that fell to their belts. They were not gods, though they were of divine blood, and they were not mortal in the manner of men; they were a third kind, and they took for themselves the wild high places of the earth.

In the time after the Titans had been overthrown and Zeus reigned in heaven, Gaia, grieving for her old children imprisoned in Tartarus, stirred up the Giants to make war upon the Olympians. The battle was joined in the great plain of Phlegra in Macedonia (or, others say, on the peninsula of Pallene), and it was fought with terrible weapons — the Giants hurled mountains, and Zeus answered with thunderbolts. Yet the Giants could not be slain by the gods alone, for an oracle had declared that no god could kill them; only by the hand of a mortal champion could the Earthborn be brought down.

So Heracles was summoned to the war, and at his side fought all the Olympians. Porphyrion the king of the Giants was slain by Zeus and Heracles together, his thunderbolt and the hero's arrow striking simultaneously. Alcyoneus, who could not die so long as he stood upon his native ground, was lifted by Heracles into the air and there strangled. Enceladus was crushed beneath the island of Sicily, and his struggling beneath the earth is still the cause of the eruptions of Mount Etna; Mimas was overcome by Hephaestus with bolts of molten metal; Polybotes was buried beneath the island of Nisyros, which Poseidon broke from Cos and hurled upon him. So one by one the Giants fell, until none remained.

The Greeks regarded the Gigantomachy as the second great cosmic war, after the Titanomachy — the war by which the order of the Olympians was sealed and after which no further challenge to their reign would come, save only the brief and terrible appearance of Typhon. The bones of the slain Giants, the ancients said, were the great bones that travellers found buried in the earth in their own time, in Phlegra and elsewhere; and the volcanic activity of Sicily and the Aegean was the unquiet sleep of the Earthborn.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

The Gigantomachy is recounted in fragments throughout Greek literature; the fullest single source is Pseudo-Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 1.6.1-2), which preserves the catalog of Giants and the manner of each one's death. Hesiod's Theogony 183-187 records their birth from the blood of Uranus, but does not narrate the war. The early epic Gigantomachia attributed to Hesiod or to the Cyclic poets has not survived; what we know of it comes from late summarizers and from artistic representations (the Pergamon Altar, c. 180 BCE, is the great surviving monument, and the Treasury of the Siphnians at Delphi preserves an earlier sixth-century version). Homer alludes to the Giants briefly in Odyssey 7.59 and 7.206. Pindar names several Giants in odes (notably Nemean 1, Pythian 8). The euhemerist tradition in Diodorus and Pausanias treated the Gigantomachy as a confused memory of a war between early peoples, but the cosmological reading — that the Giants represented the unfinished primal forces of earth, finally subdued by the Olympian order — was the dominant interpretation in classical antiquity.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Child ofGaiaGaia received it; and from those drops there sprang up a race of monstrous beings called the Gigantes
Child ofUranusthe blood of the wounded sky-god had fallen upon the earth, Gaia received it; and from those drops there sprang up a race
Rival ofZeusthe Giants hurled mountains, and Zeus answered with thunderbolts
Slain byHeraclesonly by the hand of a mortal champion could the Earthborn be brought down
Slain byZeusPorphyrion the king of the Giants was slain by Zeus and Heracles together
Slain byHephaestusMimas was overcome by Hephaestus with bolts of molten metal
Slain byPoseidonPolybotes was buried beneath the island of Nisyros, which Poseidon broke from Cos and hurled upon him
Compared withTyphonsave only the brief and terrible appearance of Typhon

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Primordial Powers. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1600–1100 BCE: Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
c. 1100–800 BCE: Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
late 8th–7th centuries BCE: The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
7th–6th centuries BCE: Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
6th–5th centuries BCE: Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
5th century BCE: Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
4th century BCE: Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
323–31 BCE: Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.