Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’re going to discuss the
eradicating exploits of Zeus, perhaps the greatest monster slayer in all of mythology.
We’re going to begin with the Cosmology, delving into how the Greeks conceptualized the creation
of the world and the emergence of the gods, and with that done, the fundamental framework
of Greek mythology delineated to a basic degree, we’re going to go over, in chronological order,
the cataclysmic conflicts that begin with Zeus’ ascension and end with Zeus supremacy
over the universe, which will see him kill Campe, defeat the Titans, destroy the Giants,
and finally, lay low Typhon, the most powerful monster in all of Greek mythology.
Alright let’s get into it.
First there was Chaos, the great void, then emerged Gaia, earth,
Tartarus, the abyss beneath the earth, and eros, sexual desire. Following these four,
came a time of independent procreation: Chaos producing Nyx, night, and Erebus, darkness,
and Gaia producing Uranus, the sky, Ourea, the mountains, and Pontus, the sea. And many
more primordial deities were brought forth into creation that we will not name. The primordial
deities, the first gods in Greek mythology, were the material manifestations of the universe,
the very regions later gods would rule over. For example, Uranus was the sky itself while Zeus
later came to rule the sky, and Pontus was the sea itself while Poseidon later came to rule the sea.
Gaia took Uranus as her consort, and together they had many children,
first the three Hecatonchires, then the three Uranian Cyclopes, and then the 12
Titans. Here’s the passage from ‘The Library of Greek Mythology’ that describes this:
“Uranus was the first ruler of the universe. He married Gaia and fathered as his first children
the beings known as the [Hecatonchires, the trio of] Hundred-Handers, Briareus, Cottos, and Gyes,
who were unsurpassable in size and strength, for each had a hundred hands and fifty heads.
After these, Gaia bore him the Cyclopes, namely, Arges, Steropes, and Brontes, each of whom had a
single eye on his forehead. But Uranus tied these children up and hurled them into Tartaros (a place
of infernal darkness in Hades, as distant from the earth as the earth from the sky):
and he then fathered by Gaia some sons called the Titans, namely, Oceanos, Coios, Hyperion, Creios,
Iapetos, and the youngest of all, Cronos, and some daughters called the Titanides,
namely, Tethys, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Dione, and Theia.”
As you can imagine, Gaia wasn’t exactly thrilled about having six of her children trussed up and
tossed into Tartarus. This was a source of sorrow for her and impelled her to make moves
against her husband, beseeching her children, the Titans, to rise up and overthrow their father.
To this end, it was Cronus, the youngest of the 12, who answered the call. Gaia
fashioned him a sickle of gray adamant, and with this weapon in hand, he lay in wait,
ready in ambush. When next Uranus, who was filled with desire, came to enfold Gaia in
the expanse of his celestial ceiling, the trap was sprung. Cronus burst from his
place of hiding and castrated Uranus, casting the severed sex of his father into the sea.
This marked the permanent separation of earth and sky, an important development in the universe
becoming properly ordered, and marked the crowning of a new king, Cronus usurping his father.
Unfortunately, Cronus proved no better than his father, the sovereign scepter passing from
one tyrant to the next, for he reimprisoned the Hecatonchires and the Uranian Cyclopes.
Cronus took his sister Rhea as his wife, and together they had six children: Hestia, Demeter,
Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, the six of them later becoming the first six Olympian gods after
they established themselves atop Mt. Olympus. Gaia and Uranus later divulged the pronouncement
of prophecy - inexorable and confounding though it was - to Cronus, telling him that he would
one day be overthrown by his son just as he had done to his father before. Of course,
this information was virtually useless because prophecy cannot be forestalled, meaning that
fighting it is futile and that people who try to do so are driven to radical, ineffective action
that gets them nowhere and prevents nothing. Such was the case with Cronus, who, in an attempt to
evade the tendrils of prognostication that sought to ensnare him, swallowed each of his children the
moment they were born, the idea being that no child of his could rise up to challenge him if
they were imprisoned in his own belly. As happened earlier with Gaia, who lamented the imprisonment
of her children within the earth, so too was Rhea similarly affected, bearing children only
to have them devoured at the moment of their birth racking her with emotional torment. Rhea resolved
to keep Zeus, her sixth child, from sharing in the foul fate of her first five children,
and to explain what she did, here’s another passage from ‘The Library of Greek Mythology:
Angered by this, Rhea went to Crete while she was pregnant with Zeus, and brought him
to birth in a cave on Mount Dicte. She gave him to the Curetes and to the nymphs Adrasteia and
Ida… to rear. So the nymphs fed the child on the milk of Amaltheia while the Curetes, fully armed,
guarded the baby in the cave, beating their spears against their shields to prevent Cronos
from hearing the child's voice. And Rhea wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and passed it to
Cronos to swallow as if it were the newborn child… [And Cronus promptly swallowed the stone without
deigning to give even a cursory inspection, and having swallowed it, he believed prophecy
thwarted and his kingship secure.] When Zeus was fully grown, he enlisted the help of Metis,
the daughter of Oceanos, and she gave Cronos a drug to swallow, which forced him to disgorge
first the stone and then the children whom he had swallowed; and with their aid, Zeus went to
war against Cronos and the Titans. When they had been fighting for ten years, Gaia prophesied that
the victory would go to Zeus if he took as his allies those who had been hurled down to Tartaros.
So the war between Cronus and Zeus raged for 10 long years, advantage vacillating throughout,
neither side able to press their superiority to the point of triumph.
After these ten tumultuous years, Gaia approached Zeus, imparting to him how to bolster his power
and best his enemies. He was told to venture down into the chasm of Tartarus, and here is where
Zeus’ monster slaying career began. With his five siblings at his side, he plunged into the abyss,
where he encountered Campe, the monstrous jailor guarding the imprisoned Hecatonchires and Uranian
Cyclopes, ensuring there were no escapes. Zeus and his intrepid companions killed Campe and freed
the prisoners, and a greater boon that swelled their strength could not have been hoped for. The
Hecatonchires were paragons of power, superlative in both size and strength, indomitable forces of
nature to behold, and they would rain down ruin upon the titans, using their combined 300 arms
to hurl volley after volley of huge boulders - gouged from the earth, leaving craters behind,
or broken off from mountains, depleting whole ranges as a quarry is depleted by men hueing rock.
The Uranian Cyclopes, while sorely wanting in raw destructive power compared to the Hecatonchires,
were, unlike their more brutish and brawny counterparts, blessed with skill and subtlety,
especially when bent towards craft. They were master smiths, and they made three
awesome weapons without equal. To Hades they gave a helmet, to Poseidon, a trident,
and to Zeus, thunder and lightning, the most powerful weapon in all of Greek mythology.
Personally augmented with amazing armaments and their numbers added to by prodigious power,
it wasn’t long before the gods, in concert with the Hecatonchires and the Uranian Cyclopes,
pounded their enemies into submission. The Titans, once beaten, were bound and
banished to the depths of Tartarus, and the Hecatonchires, prisoners no more, were made the
jailors of the Titans just as Campe was theirs before a fortuitous turn of fate freed them.
Following the defeat of the Titans, Gaia was once again angered by the imprisonment of her
children - first the Hecatonchires and the Uranian Cyclopes and now the Titans. Previously, the
extent of Gaia’s involvement was either inciting rebellion or sharing critical information,
but this time around, she assumed a more involved role, becoming a behemoth brood mother who
produced monstrous children to avenge the harsh treatment of her older children, which is how and
why the Giants and then Typhon were brought into the world. When Uranus was castrated, his genitals
cast into the sea, droplets of blood fell to the ground and impregnated the earth. Apparently this
was quite the protracted pregnancy, because it was only after the Titans were defeated that
Gaia finally gave birth to the Giants, working through them, her abominable avengers, to exact
retribution. Here’s the passage from The Library of Greek Mythology that describes what the Giants
looked like and that covers how the Gigantomachy, the war between the gods and the giants, began:
[The Giants] were unsurpassable in size, unassailable in their strength,
and fearful to behold because of the thick hair hanging down from their head and cheeks; and their
feet were formed from dragons' scales… And they hurled rocks and flaming oak trees at the heavens.
Mightiest of all were Porphyrion and Alcyoneus, who was even immortal as long as he fought on
the land of his birth. It was he, moreover, who drove the cattle of the Sun from Erytheia. Now the
gods had an oracle saying that none of the Giants could be killed by the gods [acting on their own],
but if the gods had a mortal fighting as their ally, the Giants would meet their end.
When Gaia heard of this, she searched for a herb to prevent the Giants from being
destroyed even by a mortal; but Zeus forestalled her, for he ordered Dawn, and the Moon and Sun,
not to shine and plucked the herb himself. And he sent Athena to summon Heracles as an ally.
All out war erupted between the giants and Olympus. Almost every god joined the fray,
even the fates joined in, bludgeoning giants with bronze cudgels. The gods were outnumbered,
so the giants who weren’t engaged were handled by Zeus, unleashing a great conflagration upon their
superior numbers with thunder and lightning; and because no giant could be killed without
suffering injury from a mortal, Hercules, while each giant writhed in its death throes,
shot them with arrows, which would have been superfluous damage in almost any other
circumstance, but here was indispensable, ensuring that none recovered after lethal damage was dealt.
As happened before with the imprisonment of the Titans, Gaia was similarly enraged by the
annihilation of the giants. She coupled with Tartarus and born to them was Typhon, the most
powerful monster in all of Greek mythology and the most terrible threat Olympus ever had to contend
with. Here’s a passage from Hesiod’s Theogony that describes Typhon and Zeus’ defeat of Typhon:
[Typhon’s] arms are employed in feats of strength, and the legs of the powerful god are tireless.
Out of his shoulders came a hundred fearsome snake-heads with black tongues flickering,
and the eyes in his strange heads flashed fire under the brows; and there were voices in all
his fearsome heads, giving out every kind of indescribable sound. Sometimes they uttered as
if for the gods' understanding, sometimes again the sound of a bellowing bull whose
might is uncontainable and whose voice is proud, sometimes again of a lion who knows no restraint,
sometimes again of a pack of hounds, astonishing to hear; sometimes again he hissed; and the long
mountains echoed beneath. A thing past help would have come to pass that day, and he would have
become king of mortals and immortals, had the father of gods and men not taken sharp notice.
Great Olympus quaked under the immortal feet of the lord as he went forth, and the earth groaned
beneath him. A conflagration held the violet-dark sea in its grip, both from the thunder and
lightning and from the fire of the monster, from the tornado winds and the flaming bolt… and an
uncontrollable quaking arose. Hades was trembling, lord of the dead below, and so were the Titans
down in Tartarus with Kronos in their midst, at the incessant clamour and the fearful fighting.
When Zeus had accumulated his strength, then, and taken his weapons, the thunder, lightning,
and smoking bolt, he leapt from Olympus and struck, and he scorched all the strange heads
of the dreadful monster on every side. When he had overcome him by belabouring him with his blows,
Typhon collapsed crippled, and the huge earth groaned… The huge earth burned far
and wide with unbelievable heat, melting like tin that is heated by the skill of
craftsmen in crucibles…And vexed at heart Zeus flung Typhon into broad Tartarus.
And finally, having narrowly avoided myriad dangers and having vanquished the greatest threats
Greek mythology could conjure up, Zeus’ kingship of the cosmos was crystallized. He barely escaped
imprisonment in the belly of his own father; he freed his siblings from gastric incarceration;
he braved the abyss of Tartarus, slew Campe, and freed his monstrous and mistreated uncles,
thereby gaining their allegiance; and he defeated the Titans, destroyed the giants,
and laid low Typhon. Certainly, there were still obstacles, the mythological mosaic
of the ancient Greeks packed with peril, but following the defeat of Typhon, there wasn’t,
to the best of my knowledge, any subsequent threat that really qualified as existential,
that had the possibility of cosmic upheaval, shattering Zeus’ throne and supplanting him.
And that’s it for this video. If you enjoy the content,
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