Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

But when Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven, huge Earth bare her youngest child Typhoeus of the love of Tartarus, by the aid of golden Aphrodite. Strength was with his hands in all that he did, and the feet of the strong god were untiring. From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark flickering tongues; from under the brows of his eyes in his marvellous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. There were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable: at one time sounds such that the gods understood; at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; at another, the sound of a lion relentless of heart; at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; and again he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed. Truly a thing past help would have happened on that day, and he would have come to reign over mortals and immortals, had not the father of men and gods been quick to perceive it. Zeus thundered hard and mightily: the earth around resounded terribly and the wide heaven above, and the sea and Ocean’s streams and the nether parts of the earth. Great Olympus reeled beneath the divine feet of the king as he arose, and earth groaned thereat. Through the two of them heat took hold on the dark-blue sea—through the thunder and lightning, through the fire from the monster, and the scorching winds and blazing thunderbolt. The whole earth seethed, and sky and sea; long waves raged along the beaches round about at the rush of the deathless gods; an endless shaking arose. Hades trembled where he rules over the dead below, and the Titans under Tartarus who live with Cronos, because of the unending clamour and the fearful strife. When Zeus had raised up his might and seized his arms—thunder and lightning and lurid thunderbolt—he leaped from Olympus and struck him, and burned all the marvellous heads of the monster about him. When Zeus had conquered him and lashed him with strokes, Typhoeus was hurled down, a maimed wreck, so that the huge earth groaned. Flame shot forth from the thunder-stricken lord in the dim rugged glens of the mount when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapour and melted as tin melts when heated by men’s art in channelled crucibles, or as iron is softened by glowing fire in mountain glens and melts in the divine earth through the strength of Hephaestus. Even so the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire. In the bitterness of his anger Zeus cast him into wide Tartarus. From Typhoeus come boisterous winds which blow damply—except Notus, Boreas, and clear Zephyr, which are a god-sent kind and a great blessing to men. The others blow fitfully upon the seas, rush upon the misty sea and work great havoc among men with evil raging blasts, scattering ships and destroying sailors; others over the boundless flowering earth spoil the fair fields of men, filling them with dust and cruel uproar. When the blessed gods had finished their toil and settled by force their struggle for honours with the Titans, they pressed far-seeing Olympian Zeus to reign and to rule over them, by Earth’s prompting. So he divided their dignities amongst them. In this Hesiodic telling, the combat is a direct, overwhelming duel: perception, thunder, leap from Olympus, burning of the heads, casting into Tartarus. There is no temporary defeat of Zeus, no cutting of sinews, no metamorphosis-flight of the gods to Egypt.