Typhoeus

Typhoeus, also called Typhon or Typhaon, was the youngest child of Gaea, a monster with a hundred snake heads who challenged Zeus for the rule of the gods and lost. In Hesiod he is born after Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven. He is the mate of Echidna and the ancestor of many of Greek myth’s best-known monsters.

The Youngest Child of Gaea

Hesiod says that when Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven, huge Earth bore her youngest child Typhoeus, from her love with Tartarus and with the help of golden Aphrodite. He was immensely strong, and his feet never tired. A hundred snake heads grew from his shoulders, with dark flickering tongues, and fire flashed from his eyes. His voices ranged from sounds the gods could understand to the bellowing of a bull, the roar of a lion, the yelping of puppies and a hissing that made the mountains echo (Theogony 820–835).

Apollodorus tells it a little differently. In his account Gaea, angry that the gods had defeated the Giants, lay with Tartarus and bore Typhon in Cilicia. He had a human form as far as the thighs, so tall that his head brushed the stars, with a hundred dragon heads on his hands and coils of vipers below the waist (1.6.3).

Typhoeus confronts Zeus

In Hesiod, the earth would have had a new ruler that day if Zeus had not noticed at once. He thundered and struck, and the whole earth, sky and sea boiled with the heat of thunderbolts and the monster’s fire. Zeus leapt from Olympus and burned all the monster’s heads, lashed him, and hurled him down, a maimed wreck, and in his anger cast him into wide Tartarus (Theogony 836–868). Hesiod adds that the damp, destructive winds that wreck ships come from Typhoeus, apart from the helpful Notus, Boreas and Zephyrus (869–880).

In another version (Apollodorus 1.6.3), when Typhon rushed at heaven hurling burning rocks, the gods fled to Egypt and took animal shapes. Zeus pelted Typhon with thunderbolts from a distance and struck him with an adamantine sickle at close quarters, and pursued him to Mount Casius in Syria. There Typhon coiled around Zeus, wrested the sickle from him and cut the sinews from his hands and feet. He carried Zeus through the sea to the Corycian cave in Cilicia and hid the sinews there in a bearskin, guarded by the she-dragon Delphyne. Hermes and Aegipan stole them and fitted them back to Zeus unobserved. Zeus, his strength restored, pursued Typhon in a chariot of winged horses to Mount Nysa, where the Fates tricked him into tasting “ephemeral fruits” that he thought would strengthen him, and on to Thrace, where Typhon hurled whole mountains and his blood gave Mount Haemus its name. When Typhon fled across the Sicilian sea, Zeus cast Mount Etna in Sicily on top of him, and the fire that still issues from the mountain comes from those thunderbolts.

Typhon under Etna is older than Apollodorus. Pindar calls him the hundred-headed enemy of the gods who lies in Tartarus, once nurtured by the Cilician cave and now pressed down by the cliffs above Cumae, by Sicily and by snowy Etna, “the pillar of the sky”, whose fire he sends up (Pythian 1.15–28). In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (351–372) Prometheus pities “the earth-born dweller of the Cilician caves” who withstood all the gods until the bolt of Zeus charred him, and who now lies under the roots of Etna, from which he will one day send rivers of fire over the fields of Sicily. Homer knows another resting place: Zeus lashes the land “about Typhoeus in the country of the Arimi, where men say is the couch of Typhoeus” (Iliad 2.781–783).

In a third tradition, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Typhaon is a different creature: Hera, angry that Zeus had borne Athena alone, bore him in her resentment and gave him to a she-dragon to rear. That dragon is the one Apollo kills at Delphi (Hymn 3.300–355).

Typhon marries Echidna

Typhaon was joined in love to Echidna, the nymph who was half snake, who lived in a cave beneath the earth (Hesiod, Theogony 295–308). Their children, according to Hesiod, were:

• Orthus, the hound of Geryon, later killed by Heracles.
• Cerberus, the fifty-headed hound of Hades.
• The Lernaean Hydra, raised by Hera and killed by Heracles with Iolaus. Hesiod also names the Chimaera among Echidna’s brood, and Apollodorus says that Typhon fathered her on Echidna (2.3.1).

Apollodorus adds two more: the two-headed hound Orthus is “begotten by Typhon on Echidna” (2.5.10), and the hundred-headed dragon that guarded the apples of the Hesperides was also their offspring (2.5.11).

Hesiod says that Orthus fathered the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion; the passage is usually read as making Echidna, his own mother, their mother too (Theogony 326–332). In another version (Apollodorus 3.5.8), the Sphinx, sent by Hera to Thebes, was the child of Typhon and Echidna; she killed those who could not answer her riddle until Oedipus solved it. Apollodorus also calls the Nemean Lion a beast begotten by Typhon (2.5.1), the one that Heracles was sent to kill as his first labour.

See Also: Gaea, Zeus, Echidna, Cerberus, Hermes, Apollo, Chimaera, Sphinx, Nemean Lion