War with the Giants
But before Zeus could be secure as master of the universe, he still faced great challenges, the first of which consisted of the Giants, who had sprung from the earth from the blood of Uranus, just as Aphrodite had risen from the sea. Led by Atlas, the Giants piled the mountains atop one another in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reach and storm Olympus, the mighty mountain in northern Greece which Zeus and his siblings had made their home and citadel.
Gods going to battle with Giants, from a Greek vase by Nikosthenes.
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later art and culture:
war with the titans and giants
The wars of the gods against the Titans and Giants formed a theme in the Renaissance and later Enlightenment, with artists using the allegory of enlightened values set against ignorant barbarism for the propaganda purposes of their sponsors. Examples include Giulio Romano’s The Fall of the Gigants from Mount Olympus, 1530–32, Joachim Wtewael’s The Battle Between the Gods and the Titans, 1600, and Francisco Bayeu y Subías’s Olympus: The Fall of the Giants, 1764.
War in heaven, in a fresco by Giulio Romano.
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Terrifying Typhon
The final and most awful challenger to the authority of Zeus was Typhon, the hundred-headed, the hurricane, the breather of fire. He was the youngest son of Gaia, and came closest of all to bringing the forces of disorder and darkness to victory on earth. But Zeus discovered his skill with the thunderbolts the Cyclopes had made for him and with these he smote Typhon and cast him into the earth beneath Mt Etna in Sicily, from whence Typhon still periodically belches fire in his futile rage.
Typhon smitten by Zeus’ thunderbolt (detail).
Step 4
The Cascade Effect
With Zeus, the embodiment of order, now securely on his throne on Mt Olympus, the world began to take its final shape. It was a numinous world, a world of great gods and lesser gods, and to each fell the responsibility of filling all that remained of creation.
Aspects of the gods
A divine being could fulfil the various roles ascribed to him or her in two ways. The first was by aspects – different facets of the god, each reflecting a different role that the god had assumed. Thus Zeus was the king of the gods, but he was also the bearer of thunderbolts and the gatherer of the clouds, the god of storms, and in other aspects a god of prophecy and healing and a protector of strangers. A mortal seeking divine favour would address himself to that aspect of the god he required, and indeed, if his prayers were comprehensively answered, he might even build a temple to that aspect of the god.
Children of gods
Gods could also hand on some of their responsibilities to their offspring. Thus one can imagine the world of myth as a cascade of gods flowing into every part of the world, each god creating and occupying a niche, and giving birth to children who filled the sub-niche under that. For example, Tethys, daughter of Gaia, became the consort of Oceanus, and from their union came the great rivers of Ge, and from them came thousands of nymphs, each to haunt her own grotto or pool.
Pontus, the waters, produced Nereus, the ‘Old Man of the Sea’ (who is also known as Proteus, whose ability to adapt himself to any task – or shape – has given us the adjective ‘protean’). Pontus populated every bay and cove with his descendants, the Nereids, who live also in the deep water and sport with the dolphins. And as the great gods of the waters produced minor gods, who produced yet more, ever more localized and specialized deities, so too did the other gods bear offspring in their hundreds, until there was not a force in the universe, from the winds to the seasons, which had not its own god or goddess. Each abstract idea had – was – a deity, and every grotto had a nymph, and every grove a dryad.
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later art and culture:
gaia and pontus
The pairing of Gaia with Pontus produced the divine beings Nereus, Thaumas, Phorcys, Ceto and Eurybia. It also produced the famous Union of Earth and Water by the Flemish artist Rubens in about 1618. In this, Rubens used the myth to symbolize the Dutch closing the mouth of the River Scheldt, denying the trading city of Antwerp essential access to the North Sea. Also, Sibelius, the Finnish composer, added a musical complement for the offspring of Tethys and Oceanus with his The Oceanides, a ‘symphonic poem’ written in 1913–14.
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A world of gods, a world of men
The world now created was both humanistic and numinous. Humanistic because the new gods were a part of the natural world: they were divine, but not omnipotent, and certainly not always wise. They shared the same values, aspirations and failings as humans. Although their food was ambrosia and their blood ichor, the gods ate, felt pain, jealousy and anger, and bled when injured. Yet unlike humans, the great gods were among the powers that the Greeks called daemons – normally invisible, yet omnipresent or able to travel great distances in no time at all. However, the motives behind their activities are humanly comprehensible and often far from laudable.
And as the gods were a part of the natural world, they were therefore on the same continuum that linked man with the beasts, so the division between human and divine was not clear-cut, as it is today.
Between gods and humans (the how and why of the creation of humanity is a topic for the next chapter) stood a host of beings, some of which, such as the satyrs, possessed elements of the divine while being less than human. Not only lesser divinities but even the great gods and goddesses were capable of interbreeding with humans, and did so with considerable enthusiasm.
The ancients were part of a world saturated with divine beings, and in which new divinities – even great gods such as Dionysus – were constantly appearing. Fauns and satyrs frolicked in the forest glens, and dreadful creatures such as the vampire-like stryx haunted the night. Even apparent humans might be gods travelling incognito, or demigods, or the children of gods, for humans and their gods could interact at every level and in every way that it was possible for humans to interact between themselves. There was no division between natural and supernatural – the supernatural was natural. The world of myth was still taking shape, and as will be seen, humans were fully involved in that shaping. But the order of the universe was complete – it had become a single, organized whole – or, as the Greeks would say, a ‘cosmos’.
2
Pandora’s Children:
The Human Story
Because the world of myth is holistic, with everything a part of everything else, there is no simple narrative that can explain developments as they unfolded. Humans appear early in the creation of the cosmos, and their story is interwoven with that of the gods to form a complex tapestry. Disentangling the threads of this tapestry is difficult but essential if we are to understand the interaction of humans and the divine. Humanity was older than some of the gods, and therefore it is right that their place in the cosmos should be explained here before we go on to look at particular gods and their individual stories – not least because humans are an important element in most of these stories.