Shownotes Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video we're going to take a look at the Giants, a formidable race that challenged the gods, and at the Gigantomachy, which was the calamitous war fought between the gods and the giants. And to give you an idea of what's in store, here's apollodorus' description of the giants: "unsurpassed in size, unassailable in their strength, and fearful to behold because of the thick hair hanging down from their head and cheeks" The titans definitely get the lion's share of the attention, but the giants were also incredibly powerful and weren't to be trifled with. Let's get into it. In Greek mythology, there were two types of giants. The first type featured an array of characters, all unrelated to each other, who were of enormous size. Examples of this type include the giants Otus and Ephialtes, known for storming mount olympus and stuffing Ares in a bronze jar, Talos, a bronze giant, and Orion, a giant who was a master hunter. The other type of giants was the race of giants spawned from the droplets of blood that fell to the earth from Uranus' severed genitals after he was castrated and thereby Usurped by his youngest son Cronus. The Erinyes, commonly known as the furies, were created in the same way, also spawning from the earth after Uranus' blood saturated and impregnated the earth. According to Apollodorus, Gaia was furious with the gods after the Titanomachy. All of the titans who fought against Zeus - except for Atlas who was sentenced to hold up the sky for eternity - were cast down into the depths of Tartarus. Gaia wished for her children to be free, so she absorbed the droplets of Uranus' blood, became impregnated, and then birthed a new race of beings, the giants, a race with god-like power. The war that ensued was called the Gigantomachy, and it was the penultimate conflict Olympus would have to content with: the last major threat Olympus was assailed by was the monster Typhon, a son of Gaia and Tartarus and the most powerful monster in Greek mythology. To put all the major conflicts in order, it went: Titanomachy, the war against the titans, then Gigantomachy, the war against the giants, and then the battle against Typhon.