Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When Achilles reminds Thetis of her past claim on Zeus, he recalls how she once saved the king of the gods. Hera, Poseidon, and Athena had bound Zeus, intending to put him in chains. Thetis alone among the Olympians’ circle freed him: she summoned to Olympus Briareus, whom the gods call Briareus but men call Aegaeon—a hundred-handed giant stronger than his father. He sat beside Zeus in the pride of his strength, and the would-be binders dropped their plan in fear. The vignette anchors Thetis’s right to ask Zeus for a favor (the promise that will cost the Achaeans so dearly) and preserves a Homeric glimpse of the Hundred-Handers outside Hesiod’s Titanomachy: here Briareus is not Tartarus’s jailer of Titans but the living deterrent who once secured Zeus’s throne. Catalogue the Iliadic rescue apart from the cosmogonic birth and war files.