Characters
- Brontes, Steropes, Arges — Cyclopes; later forgers of Zeus’s thunderbolt
- Cottus, Briareos (Aegaeon), Gyes — Hecatoncheires; later Titanomachy allies and Tartarus warders
- Gaia — mother; groans under Uranus’s imprisonment of her children
- Olympian gods — elder siblings; beneficiaries of the castration; later opponents of Zeus
- Uranus — father; hides Cyclopes and Hecatoncheires from the light
- Zeus — liberator who receives the bolt and the hundred-handed aid
Places
- Earth — womb and prison where Uranus hides the brood
- Olympus — destination of the Cyclopes’ gifts
- Tartarus — later prison watched by the Hundred-Handers
Themes
Narrative
After Gaia lay with Uranus and bore the Titans, Hesiod names two further sets of children whom Heaven hated and hid. First the Cyclopes—Brontes (Thunder), Steropes (Lightning), and Arges (Bright)—each with one round eye in the forehead, otherwise like the gods, who later gave Zeus thunder and the smoking bolt. Next the three Hecatoncheires (Hundred-Handers): Cottus, Briareos (also Aegaeon in Homeric notice), and Gyes—insolent, unapproachable, with a hundred arms and fifty heads apiece, immense strength in their vast forms.
Uranus thrust these mighty ones into a secret place of Earth and did not let them into the light; Gaia groaned within and plotted the castration that freed the Titans’ rise. Long afterward Zeus, counselled to unlock Earth’s hidden strength, freed the Cyclopes, who armed him with thunder, lightning, and the bolt, and freed the Hundred-Handers, who became the decisive throwers of rocks in the Titanomachy and later warders of the imprisoned Titans in Tartarus.
This entry catalogues the Hesiodic birth and nature of the two brotherhoods as discrete theogonic facts—the smiths of Zeus’s weapons and the hundred-handed allies—apart from the castration narrative and the war itself.