The Greek mythological tradition is built on three great wars of the gods. The Titanomachy is the war in which Zeus and the Olympians overthrew the Titans and established their rule. The Gigantomachy is the war in which the Olympians defeated the Giants, the older children of Gaia, who rose up to challenge the new order. The Trojan War is the war in which the gods took sides in a human conflict, and in which the cost of the war fell on the divine order as well as the human. The three wars are structurally similar: each is a war of the new against the old, each ends in the victory of the new, and each leaves a residue — the Titans in Tartarus, the Giants under the mountains, the Greek heroes dead on the plain. The Greek tradition is unusual in having not one but three such wars, and the structure is the source of much of the Greek sense of divine justice: the new order always wins, but the winning is never clean.
The Titanomachy
The Titanomachy is the war of Zeus and the Olympians against the Titans, the children of Ouranos and Gaia. The war was foretold by a prophecy — Cronus, the leader of the Titans, would be overthrown by his own children — and it was, in the standard account, a ten-year war that ended in the victory of the Olympians and the imprisonment of the Titans in Tartarus. The cause of the war was the swallowing of Zeus’s siblings by Cronus, the rescue of Zeus by Rhea, the tricking of Cronus into disgorging the children, and the alliance of the children with the Cyclopes and the Hecatoncheires, who had been freed by Zeus from the prison of Cronus.
The Cyclopes, in the standard account, were the sons of Ouranos and Gaia, three in number, each with one eye in the middle of his forehead: Brontes (“Thunder”), Steropes (“Lightning”), and Arges (“Bright”). They were the divine smiths, the original forgers of Zeus’s thunderbolts. The Hecatoncheires, also children of Ouranos and Gaia, were three in number, each with fifty heads and a hundred hands: Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges. Ouranos had imprisoned all six of these monstrous children inside Gaia’s body, but Zeus freed them and won their alliance: the Cyclopes forged the thunderbolts, the Hecatoncheires hurled mountains at the Titans. The Titans, who were huge and strong, were defeated by the combination of the new weapons (the thunderbolts) and the new tactics (the Hecatoncheires).
The Titanomachy is told in detail in Hesiod’s Theogony (lines 617–735) and is the central event of the Theogony’s second half. The image of Zeus hurling his thunderbolts, the Titans reeling under the blows, the Hecatoncheires throwing whole mountains at them: this is the vision of divine warfare that became the standard Greek image of the new order’s victory. The same image is preserved on the great frieze of the altar of Zeus at Pergamon (c. 200–150 BCE), which is the most famous surviving depiction of the Gigantomachy but uses the same iconography of divine weapons and divine bodies.
After the victory, the Titans were cast into Tartarus, the deep prison at the lowest level of the underworld. The Hecatoncheires, who had been their tormentors, became their guards. Hades, who had been given the underworld as his realm in the division of the cosmos, ruled over them. The standard Greek reading is that the Titans are still there, in the deep prison, and that the volcanic fire of Mount Etna and other volcanoes is the breathing of the imprisoned Titans. Theophrastus and other later writers preserved the same reading, and it became the standard Greek explanation of volcanic activity.
The Gigantomachy
The Gigantomachy is the war of the Olympians against the Giants, the older children of Gaia, who rose up to challenge the new order of Zeus. The cause of the war is the standard one in the Greek tradition: a prophecy. The Giants, born of Gaia from the blood of the castrated Ouranos, were destined to overthrow the Olympians, and they rose up in rebellion, heaping mountain on mountain to reach Olympus. The war was long and hard, and the Olympians could not win until they had the help of a mortal — Heracles, the son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene. Heracles killed two of the Giants (Alcyoneus and Porphyrion) and tipped the balance in the Olympians’ favour.
The Gigantomachy is the standard Greek image of the second rebellion against the new order, after the Titanomachy. The Titans were the older order, the sons of Ouranos; the Giants are the offspring of the castration, the residue of the first rebellion. The myth is the standard Greek image of how the new order is repeatedly challenged, and repeatedly wins. The Olympian victory is secured by the introduction of a mortal — Heracles, who is a hero but who is also mortal, and whose mortality is the source of his special power. The mortal who helps the gods is the standard pattern: he is the exception that proves the rule, and his exception is what the hero is for.
The most famous surviving depiction of the Gigantomachy is the great frieze of the altar of Zeus at Pergamon, now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. The frieze shows the Olympians in a long procession, fighting the Giants with thunderbolts, spears, and torches. The Giants are shown as hybrid creatures with serpent legs, the standard iconography of the Gigantomachy in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The frieze was the model for the Baroque and Neoclassical depictions of the Gigantomachy (and the war of the Olympians against the older order) for two thousand years.
The Trojan War
The Trojan War is the third great war of the Greek gods, and the only one in which the gods take sides in a human conflict. The war, told in the Iliad of Homer and in the Aeneid of Virgil, was a ten-year siege of the city of Troy on the western coast of Asia Minor, fought between the Greek coalition and the Trojan defenders. The cause of the war was the Judgment of Paris, in which the Trojan prince Paris was asked to choose the most beautiful of the three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, and to receive a bribe from each. Paris chose Aphrodite’s bribe (the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta), and the war was the consequence of his choice.
The gods took sides in the war. Hera, Athena, and Poseidon supported the Greeks (Aphrodite’s rivals in the Judgment, all of them, and Poseidon because of a grudge against Troy). Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Leto supported the Trojans. Zeus tried to remain neutral, but he was bribed, manipulated, or distracted by the others, and the war went on. The Iliad is a long meditation on the cost of the divine participation: the gods are wounded (Ares, Aphrodite, Hades, all wounded in turn), they fight each other on the plain, they take sides, and the war becomes a divine war as well as a human one. The final cost is the death of the heroes: Achilles, Patroclus, Hector, Ajax, Memnon, the greatest of both sides. The Trojan War is the last of the great divine wars, and the cost is the most.
The Greek tradition also knew the Aftermath of the war: the Nostoi (the homecomings), the Telegony (the death of Odysseus), the Aethiopis (the death of Achilles), the Little Iliad (the fall of Troy), the Iliou Persis (the sack of the city), and the Aeneid of Virgil (the flight of Aeneas). The full story of the war and its aftermath is told in the Epic Cycle, of which only the Iliad and Odyssey survive. The structure of the cycle is the standard Greek image of a war that has consequences for several generations, and the modern reader who reads only the Iliad is missing most of the story.
A Note on Reading the Three Wars
The three great wars of the gods are not the same story. The Titanomachy is the story of the founding of the divine order, in which the new gods (Olympians) overthrow the old gods (Titans) and establish the rule that will hold for the heroic age. The Gigantomachy is the story of the consolidation of the divine order, in which the older order (the residue of the castration) tries one more time to overthrow the new and fails. The Trojan War is the story of the divine order’s corruption, in which the gods take sides in a human conflict, and the divine order is itself consumed by the war. The three wars are a sequence: the Titanomachy is the foundation, the Gigantomachy is the consolidation, the Trojan War is the death.
The death is not, in the Greek tradition, the end of the divine order. The Greek tradition continued, and the Greek gods continued to be worshipped, and the Greek city-states continued to build temples to the Olympians. But the Trojan War is the moment in the Greek tradition when the divine order is most clearly exposed as morally ambiguous, and the exposure is what the Iliad is built around. The Titanomachy is the divine order at its most confident. The Trojan War is the divine order at its most uncertain. The Iliad is the record of the uncertainty.
For more, see the Olympian gods guide, the Zeus profile, the Trojan War guide, and the Hesiod page.