9 - Of Gods and Giants: Myth and Images in the Making

Summary

The primary function of the peplos that the Athenians dedicated to their goddess was the tangible demonstration of the worshipers’ continuous, never-ending veneration and cult practice. Since 566 BC, when the festival was reorganized, the peplos woven for the Great Panathenaia was decorated with a narrative image: Olympian gods fighting giants. The myth of the gigantomachy as a common effort of the Olympian gods (starring Zeus and Athena, with Herakles as helper) was actually invented for the Great Panathenaia. Its introduction as an innovation and its first presentation to the public must have occurred in the form of a poem (a hymn). The promulgation and popularization of the narrative occurred largely through visual media – images on textiles, paintings, pottery, and votive reliefs, and in architectural sculpture.

This chapter focuses on the purpose and destination of these images (on the Akropolis in the sixth and fifth centuries) and addresses the multifaceted question of their meaning – their form and content, use and function, message and relevance, importance and significance.

Hesiod is the earliest preserved source for the giants who concern us here – the gigantes. In his Theogony, he lists them among the offspring of Gaia, the earth, and calls them megaloi, “shining in their armor, holding long spears in their hands.” With this pedigree and characterization, the giants are appropriate challengers for gods and for heroes who qualify as gods by subduing sinister and threatening creatures. Thus, the first evidence for fights with giants, such as the sculpted pediment from the Temple of Artemis on Corfu or the lines in Ibykos and Xenophanes, might not be the first tales or images of that subject.

There is, however, no evidence of a female figure or a group of gods facing a giant or giants before the mid-sixth century BC. Then, suddenly, the first scenes of what we call the gigantomachy – the joint fight of Olympian gods against giants – appear on about twenty Athenian vases produced in different workshops, eleven of them (G1–G11) found on the Akropolis or its north slope (Figs. 9.1–9.8).