Alternative Theogonies 2: The Theogony of Eumelus' Titanomachy : r/GreekMythology

Nope, we are told nothing about her, which is to be expected when considering how few details about this war are available and what a minimal presence Metis has in the myths (she appears in about 6 sources in all extant Greek mythology, almost exclusively in the context of Athena's birth)). In his description of the war Hesiod only mentions Zeus, the other children of Kronos as a collective, the collective of Titans, the Hekatoncheires as Zeus's most essential allies in battle and eventual guarrds over the imprisoned Titans, the Kyklopes who provide him with his greatest weapon and Gaia who offers him the advice that allows him to win. In the Theogony Metis only appears as a character in the narrative when Zeus is already king of the gods, after both the Titanomachy and Typhonomachy. Hesiod is very vague about what other allies Zeus gathers before the war and while it is possible that she was one of them, we are really only informed about Styx, first to join him together with her children. In the Library of Pseudo-Apollodoros Metis appears once before the war to give Kronos the drug that makes him throw up his children, and once at some point after the Titanomachy when she gets sexually assaulted and cannibalized by Zeus. If she did anything between these two events we are not told, and the only figures Apollodoros mentions in his brief description of the Titanomachy are Zeus and his siblings, Kronos and the Titans, Gaia, the Kyklopes and, to a lesser extent than in Hesiod, the Hekatoncheires.

There are only a few surviving fragments from the lost epic poem about the Titanomachy, none of which mention her. She also isn't mentioned in connection with the Titan war in any other sources that say anything about it, not even in the Dionysiaca which adds a lot of details and participants that we don't hear of elsewhere.

I like the idea that Eirene (Peace) was the first deity to be born after the Titanomachy. A birth that is all the more meaningful since it came about as a result of a union between a member of the new generation of gods and one belonging to the previous one. It just feels like a very fitting event after a (primarily) intergenerational conflict.

The Titanomachy is more complicated because we have relatively little information about it - very few literary sources that describe it in any sort of detail and no certain visual representations. If only we had the lost Titanomachia epic!

In Hesiod's Theogony at least it seems that they do fight in the Titan war (though Zeus alone of the Olympians plays a notable role): "Their spirits began to yearn for battle even more than before, and they raised such conflict as none would find fault with, all of them, both females and males, on that day, the Titan gods and those born of Kronos, and those whom Zeus brought to the light from the gloom beneath the earth, fearful and powerful ones with overbearing strength."

However, things are far from consistent and in Book 14 of the Iliad Hera says that she was being raised by Okeanos and Tethys when Zeus fought and imprisoned Kronos: [Okeanos and Tethys] who in their house nurtured me well and raised me after receiving me from Rhea, when far-thundering Zeus set Cronus down beneath the earth and murmuring sea.". Elsewhere in the Iliad Hera is called the eldest daughter of Kronos (Il. 4.59), so if she was too young to participate in the battle then presumably her sisters were as well, unless we assume that Zeus's dispatch of Kronos and the actual Titanomachy were two separate events.

In the Library of Apollodoros 1.2.1. (which is possibly using information from the lost Titanomachia) things are ambiguous and it is possible that the goddesses do fight, but only the males are actually mentioned and only they receive weapons from the Kyklopes: "… and with their [the regurgitated children of Kronos] aid Zeus waged the war against Cronus and the Titans. They fought for ten years, and Earth prophesied victory to Zeus if he should have as allies those who had been hurled down to Tartarus. So he slew their jailoress Campe, and loosed their bonds. And the Cyclopes then gave Zeus thunder and lightning and a thunderbolt, and on Pluto they bestowed a helmet and on Poseidon a trident. Armed with these weapons the gods overcame the Titans, shut them up in Tartarus, and appointed the Hundred-handers their guards; but they themselves cast lots for the sovereignty, and to Zeus was allotted the dominion of the sky, to Poseidon the dominion of the sea, and to Pluto the dominion in Hades."

The Titanomachy related by Pseudo Hyginus (Fabulae 150) is instigated by Hera, but she doesn't seem to actually fight, nor does any other of the elder gods except for Zeus himself: "After Juno saw that Epaphus, born of a concubine, ruled such a great kingdom, she saw to it that he should be killed while hunting, and encouraged the Titans to drive Jove from the kingdom and restore it to Saturn. When they tried to mount to heaven, Jove with the help of Minerva, Apollo, and Diana, cast them headlong into Tartarus."

In the Euhemeristic account related in The Sibylline Oracles (3.176-184) only the males are mentioned in the context of the war, though admittedly Hera is their only sister in this version: "But when the Titans heard that there were sons Kept secretly, whom Cronos and his wife Rhea begat, then Titan sixty youths Together gathered, and held fast in chains Cronos and his wife Rhea, and concealed Them in the earth and guarded them in bonds. And then the sons of powerful Cronos heard, And a great war and uproar they aroused."

And then there is Nonnos at the end of Antiquity who explicitly states (and he is the only one to ever do so as far as I know) that Hera fought in the Titanomachy: "Hera the Titan's daughter took strong part in the war against Kronos her father and helped Zeus in his fight." (Dionysiaca 31.264) Whether Hestia and Demeter did the same I don't recall him ever mentioning, but he does say that several of Zeus's children (Ares and Athena for sure) fought the Titans so do with that timeline what you will.

The Gigantomachy is better attested in literature and especially art, so we can be sure that Hera was at least sometimes thought to participate in it. Pseudo-Apollodoros' Library provides the fullest account of the battle and is the only literary source I know of that makes Hera's presence on the battlefield explicit, although we don't really hear of her doing any fighting or defeating any named Giant, only being attacked and overpowered by one. However, she does fight in several visual representations of the Gigantomachy, both on vases and on friezes. Not all representations include her, of course, and sometimes a particular figure is merely assumed to be Hera in lack of an inscription or any identifying attribute.

Hestia and Demeter on the other hand aren't mentioned among the gods who fight the Giants in the Library or in any other literary source that I am aware of and I don't know of any artistic representations of the Gigantomachy that involves them for sure either. Now obviously there are hundreds of representations of this myth (I couldn't check them all even if the visual arts were accessible to me) and there are several figures who could be interpreted as Demeter, but Mary B. Moore (Lydos and the Gigantomachy') confirms my impression that "[Demeter] is not identified for certain in any representation of this battle, nor is she mentioned in any literary reference to it." It is curious that not even in the Gigantomachy on the Pergamon frieze is Demeter's presence certain (much less Hestia's) though this has to be the most expansive version of the battle and everyone and their mother is there, literally! Alongside the usual players there are also Leto, Asterie, Phoibe, Dione, Doris and Nereus to name but a few.

Just as Demeter and Hestia don't seem to participate in the Gigantomachy, so too are they absent from another conflict that most of the Olympian gods get involved in: the Trojan War. I guess these two really don't care for war and are important enough that no one's going to complain about them not getting their hands dirty.

I want the lost epic poem about the Titanomachy so so so so bad. It's frustrating how little we know about it and how few fragments from it have survived.

The odd detail about Hera being raised by Tethys and Okeanos (and probably the main reason why the idea never held much appeal to me) is that it supposedly happened while Zeus was fighting Kronos, as Hera herself relates: „... Ocean, the source of the gods, and mother Tethys, who in their house nurtured me well and raised me, after receiving me from Rhea, when far-thundering Zeus set Cronus down beneath the earth and murmuring sea.” (Iliad 14.200 ff)

So not only does this suggest that Hera didn't participate in the Titanomachy at all, but even that she was an actual child at the time which is just… weird and uncomfortable especially since Zeus was presumably an adult.

„This goat was a child of Helios, and it was so terrifying to behold that the gods of the age of Kronos, struck with horror at its appearance, had asked Earth to hide it away in one of the caves in Crete; so she hid it there, placing it under the care of Amaltheia, who fed Zeus with its milk. When the boy came of age and was preparing to make war against the Titans, an oracle advised him, since he had no weapons, to make use of the goat's hide as a weapon, because it was impenetrable and terrifying, and because it had a Gorgon's head set on the middle of its back. Zeus acted accordingly, and appeared twice as strong as a result of this stratagem. He covered the bones of the goat with another hide, and brought it to life again and rendered it immortal.” (Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Catasterismi)

Help I can't get over the image of the Titans being absolutely horrified by a goat. A weird and unusual goat, granted, but still.

And because the role played by Themis in Zeus' rise to power is often completely ignored, let's review her contributions:

She helped save Zeus from Kronos by taking him from Rhea and bringing him to Crete (X).

She was the one who, in preparation to the Titanomachy, advised Zeus to make his Aigis from the skin of a goat who was invulnerable and whose appearance terrified the Titans (X).

In the Prometheus Bound of Aischylos, Themis is identified with Gaia, joins Zeus against the Titans and prophesies how the war is going to be won) (X).

I kind of interpreted the event mentioned in Hyginus as a second Titanomachy, given that Zeus was already king at the time, the Titans were supposed to bring Kronos back to power, and their leader was Atlas rather than any of the elder Titans. Maybe this was a rebellion started by some of the Titans who had not been imprisoned into Tartaros previously, or maybe, and I think this is most plausible, we have here a case of conflating the Titanomachy and Gigantomachy. This happens quite frequently in Greek texts as well.

But in both Hesiod's Theogony and Apollodoros' Library all of the younger Olympians are clearly conceived and born after the Titan war, and this makes far more sense to me; getting random goddesses pregnant just before or during a great war doesn't sound like a very good idea and was probably not among Zeus' priorities at the time. The Titanomachy was a war fought by the children of Kronos and Rhea (with the help of various allies), the Gigantomachy was a battle where all (or most of) the gods, elder and younger alike, participated.

Musaeus: Fragments

Aischylos, Prometheus Bound

Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Christos Tsagalis

Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Christos Tsagalis

"I know where I get these troubles from. My father's Avenger demands bloodprice from me for violence done to a father, because Hera the Titan's daughter took strong part in the war against Kronos her father and helped Zeus in his fight." - Nonnos, Dionysiaca

"[Zeus] in his first youth battered the earthborn Titanes for Olympos, when he was only a boy . . . Kronos still dripping held the emasculating sickleblade, after he had cut off the manly crop of his father's plow and robbed him of the Mother's bed to which he was hastening, and warred against [Zeus] at the head of the Titanes. Broadbeard Kronos fanned the flame of Enyo as he cast icy spears against Kronion, shooting his cold watery shafts: sharp pointed arrows of hail were shot from the sky. But Zeus armed himself with more fires than Helios and melted the petrified water with hotter sparks." - Nonnos, Dionysiaca 18. 223 ff

“The structure of the Hesiodic Titanomachy has been divided by most who have analyzed it into three discrete sections. The first of these sections (617-86) tells of the liberated Hecatoncheires combining forces with the children of Kronos and renewing their ten-year struggle with the Titans. Lines 687 and following interrupt the narrative of this general theomachy to present a fiery vision of Zeus in single combat and are therefore conventionally referred to as the "aristeia" of Zeus; the allies are momentarily lost from view, and Zeus relies solely on the destructive force of the thunderbolt. It has been customary to regard this second section as extending as far as line 712, at which point the tide of the battle appears to have been turned by Zeus' single-handed efforts: . . .  The outcome still seems to be hanging in the balance, however, when we are abruptly plunged back into the general melee in lines 713-20, where this time it is the Hecatoncheires who turn the tide. In this second denouement we do not hear of Zeus or his storm weaponry playing any part, and the victory appears to be determined solely by the actions of the three allies. In his 1831 edition of the Theogony Goettling effectively eliminated the problem by ejecting 687-712 on the ground that Zeus' aristeia intolerably interrupts the "seriem narrationis." This remedy has subsequently received the sympathy of Meyer, Rzach, Aly, Mazon, Jacoby, van Groningen, and Kirk. Wilamowitz objected forcefully, however, that the retention of the aristeia is demanded by the thematic structure of the poem, as well as by everything that we can infer about Hesiod's theological convictions; without the aristeia, in his words, "hat die ganze Theogonie keinen Sinn und Hesiod keinen Glauben." He resolved the problem of the doubly-determined victory by arguing that the imprisoning of the wounded Titans "schickt sich nicht fUr die Olympier" and that this task therefore must fall to the Hecatoncheires, who first come into action for this purpose. Other defenders of the received text have similarly attempted to diminish the significance of the allied contribution. Schwenn felt that the only real importance of the Hecatoncheires is to arouse and incite the Olympians (and Zeus in particular) to greater efforts; it is then Zeus who does the "Hauptarbeit," with the allies merely finishing the job. P. Walcot likewise speaks of "'mopping up' operations" carried out by the Hecatoncheires after Zeus has done the lion's share of the work. . . .

As the representative examples cited above suggest, it has been typical of previous analyses of the Hesiodic Titanomachy to concentrate attention on Zeus at the expense of the Hecatoncheires. To understand why Hesiod has composed the Titanomachy as he has, it will be useful if we first examine more closely the role played by these allies; in particular, we should attempt to distinguish between the representation of the Hecatoncheires in Hesiod's poem and their significance in the traditional, pre-Hesiodic form of the myth. We can of course know nothing about the latter with certainty, but an analysis of Hesiod's text supplemented by the judicious use of comparative data can at least establish some strong probabilities. . . .After ten years of indecisive warfare, the Olympians free the Hecaton cheires from captivity on the advice of Gaia: . . . This prophecy is characteristically vague regarding just what the Hecatoncheires will contribute, but clearly they are to be thought of as some how necessary for victory: to tell someone who has been fighting with out success for ten years that he will be victorious if he solicits the support of certain allies is surely to imply that without that support the stalemate will continue. The narrative convention which guarantees that such prophecies always come true also guarantees that they are never superfluous. Moreover, in the description of the final action of the battle (713-20), the Titans are not ultimately scorched by lightning (as was Typhon, a true victim of Zeus' thunderbolt) but over whelmed by rocks-exactly three hundred rocks hurled, we must assume, by three hundred hands (715). It could not be made more numerically explicit that neither Zeus nor any of the other Olympians plays any part in this final action. In the end it is the Hecatoncheires who send the defeated Titans down to Tartaros (717-18), bind them in chains (718-19), and guard them, presumably for eternity (734-35). Considering both the physical peculiarity of the allies and the manner of the Titans' final defeat, I would suggest that in the popular conception of this primordial battle the rocks were seen as the decisive weapon in the defeat of the Titans, rather than Zeus' thunderbolt, which he presumably had been wielding throughout the ten-year stalemate. It has on occasion even been suggested that in the earlier tradition the Titanomachy was exclusively a battle between the Titans and the Hecatoncheires. It is debatable whether we are justified, on the basis of such slim evidence, in eliminating completely the role of Zeus and the other Olympians in the pre-Hesiodic conception of this conflict. But I think that we can at least say that any reasonable interpretation of Hesiod's Titanomachy must recognize at the outset that the poet is bound by a popular tradition in which the hundred-handed allies are a decisive factor, if not the decisive factor, in the victory which first brought Zeus to power. In keeping with his idealization of Zeus' regency, Hesiod is trying to recast the Titanomachy, and especially Zeus' role in it, in the mold of heroic epic while perforce remaining within the broad limits set by this tradition. To this end many of the thematic trappings of human heroic warfare are present or at least suggested; the typical motifs of the hero's aristeia, arming with special weapons (cf. 501-6), war councils, and the pre-combat feast all serve to lend a heroic atmosphere to the struggle with the Titans, as does the fact that, like Homer's war, this one has been waged inconclusively for ten years.”

 - Tradition and Innovation in the Hesiodic Titanomachy by Robert Mondi

“The particular problem I wish to address using this approach to Hesiod's text is that of the' relationship between the overthrow of Kronos and the Titanomachy. The battle between the Olympians and Titans is explicitly referred to four times in the course of the Theogony: in the Titanomachy proper (617-720), in the hymn to Styx (390-92), at the beginning of the Typhonomachy (820), and in a brief epilogue to the Titanomachy which is deferred until after the fall of Typhoeus (881-85). It is remarkable that not only do we never hear of Kronos in any way taking part in this Titanomachy, but once the narrative of his deception by Zeus is broken off so abruptly at line 500, we in fact never hear of him again. If Hesiod imagined him to be a combatant in the Titanomachy, why is his role never mentioned? Admittedly none of the Titans is mentioned specifically by name in the Titanomachy itself (and traditionally they may not even have had individual names)~ but Kronos has after all been portrayed as the (earlier king of the gods), and we might expect that at least the leader of the enemy forces would be singled out for mention in the narrative of this conflict, especially since it would be the very conflict in which he was forced from the throne. If, on the other hand, we are to assume that Kronos had somehow already been eliminated by Zeus as a result of the events in lines 453-500 and therefore was not one of the participants in the subsequent theomachy, why was this earlier elimination not made more explicit? In either case the sudden disappearance of Kronos from the narrative is puzzling in the extreme: the elevation of Zeus to the throne previously held by his father is by every critic's reckoning the climactic moment in Hesiod's vision of divine history; yet in the text of his poem it is not at all clear at what point this climactic moment actually occurs. Previous attempts to resolve the problem posed by this double narrative of Zeus' rise to power illustrate the kinds of arguments employed by the critic who wishes to see the Theogony as a synchronic unity and at the same time cast the most favorable light on Hesiod's narrative ability. According to Solmsen, for instance, Hesiod "draws us into the atmosphere of Zeus' reign long before it is finally and securely established; he unfolds it by degrees and guides us to the realization of its existence before it is historically achieved." An alternative means of forcing synchronic logic on the text is to suppose that the Titans are actually rebels against a Zeus already in power: so Paley spoke of the "acts of Zeus in punishing rebels against his authority." But neither Hesiod's text nor the subsequent Greek literary tradition will support this notion: the Titans are the "former gods" who are now in Tartaros, and the Olympian hierarchy is not in place until after they are deposed as a result of the Titanomachy. If anything, it is Zeus and his allies who are the rebels against established authority.

This twice-told tale of Zeus' acquisition of the kingship is just the sort of narrative doubling that we would expect when diachronically independent traditional material is combined in a non-traditional complex. I suggest that we have here the Hesiodic juxtaposition of two previously independent songs representing mutually exclusive traditions. Each presents a different mythological narrative of Zeus' rise to power, in one case through the patrilinear succession Ouranos-Kronos-Zeus, with never any question about who the leader of the new generation would be (453-500), and in the other case as the result of a general theomachy in which the new gods as a group oust their predecessors and establish Zeus on the celestial throne (617-720). . . . In sum, the Titanomachy and the hymn to Zeus, as they appear in the Theogony, present diachronically independent mythological narratives, and as late as Hesiod's time there was not yet any established tradition for combining them. Perhaps the coexistence of such alternative myths has a regional explanation; in any case, in creating his Panhellenic theogony Hesiod himself has simply placed these two songs in sequential juxtaposition, according to the compositional principles outlined in part I. Consequently, it is pointless to try to understand or reconcile them synchronically. Hesiod does not mention Kronos in the Titanomachy because traditionally Kronos did not play any outstanding role there, just as the Titans did not figure in the alternative tradition, based on the Hellenized Hittite myth, of Zeus' birth and single-handed expulsion of his father. That Hesiod's combination of the two songs is a non-traditional one is indicated not only by the fact that the contents of the two songs are simply juxtaposed in the Theogony rather than conflated (as we might expect to have happened during transmission over a longer period of time), but also because when such a conflation does inevitably occur in postHesiodic sources, both possibilities inherent in Hesiod's ambiguous narrative are realized: in some cases Zeus first disposes of Kronos separately and then goes on to fight the Titans, in others the outwitted Kronos joins with the Titans in battling Zeus and his newly liberated siblings. We may now answer the question raised at the outset about the sudden disappearance of Kronos from the main narrative thread of the Theogony. Any self-contained realization of the hymn to Zeus surely would have concluded with an explicit statement of the transfer of celestial authority after Kronos released his children and was overcome by Zeus. But Hesiod is here faced with the same dilemma as earlier when he inserted the abbreviated narrative about the children of Styx. Any explicit depiction of the transfer of power at this point in the Theogony would render a subsequent narrative of an alternative tale of Zeus' rise to power-the Titanomachy-nonsensical. So Hesiod made at least a rudimentary attempt to preserve a degree of narrative flow in his composite Theogony by suppressing the end of the first of these two juxtaposed narratives. The outcome of the deception of Kronos-the enthroning of Zeus and the distribution of timai simply passed over in silence, and Zeus does not explicitly assume the reins of power and redistribute the divine prerogatives until lines 881-85 - that is, not until after the second of these two narratives describing how he attained them.”

 - The Ascension of Zeus and the Composition of Hesiod's Theogony  by Robert Mondi