Typhon

Mythology

Birth

According to Hesiod's Theogony (c. 8th–7th century BC), Typhon was the son of Gaia (Earth) and Tartarus: "when Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven, huge Earth bore her youngest child Typhoeus of the love of Tartarus, by the aid of golden Aphrodite". The mythographer Apollodorus (1st or 2nd century AD) adds that Gaia bore Typhon in anger at the gods for their destruction of her offspring the Giants.

Numerous other sources mention Typhon as being the offspring of Gaia, or simply "earth-born", with no mention of Tartarus. However, according to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (6th century BC), Typhon was the child of Hera alone. Hera, angry at Zeus for having given birth to Athena by himself, prayed to Gaia, Uranus, and the Titans, to give her a son stronger than Zeus, then slapped the ground and became pregnant. Hera gave the infant Typhon to the serpent Python to raise, and Typhon grew up to become a great bane to mortals.

Several sources locate Typhon's birth and dwelling place in Cilicia, and in particular the region in the vicinity of the ancient Cilician coastal city of Corycus (modern Kızkalesi, Turkey). The poet Pindar (c. 470 BC) calls Typhon "Cilician", and says that Typhon was born in Cilicia and nurtured in "the famous Cilician cave", an apparent allusion to the Corycian cave in Turkey. In Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Typhon is called the "dweller of the Cilician caves", and both Apollodorus and the poet Nonnus (4th or 5th century AD) have Typhon born in Cilicia.

The b scholia to Iliad 2.783, preserving a possibly Orphic tradition, has Typhon born in Cilicia, as the offspring of Cronus. Gaia, angry at the destruction of the Giants, slanders Zeus to Hera. So Hera goes to Cronus, the father of her and Zeus (whom Zeus had overthrown), and Cronus gives Hera two eggs smeared with his own semen, telling her to bury them underground, and that from them would be born one who would overthrow Zeus. Hera, angry at Zeus, buries the eggs in Cilicia "under Arimon", but when Typhon is born, Hera, now reconciled with Zeus, informs him.

Descriptions

According to Hesiod, Typhon was "terrible, outrageous and lawless", immensely powerful, and on his shoulders were one hundred snake heads, that emitted fire and every kind of noise:

Strength was with his hands in all that he did and the feet of the strong god were untiring. From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvelous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; and again, at another, he would hiss, so that the high mountains re-echoed.

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo describes Typhon as "fell" and "cruel", and like neither gods nor men. Three of Pindar's poems have Typhon as hundred-headed (as in Hesiod), while apparently a fourth gives him only fifty heads, but a hundred heads for Typhon became standard. A Chalcidian hydria (c. 540–530 BC), depicts Typhon as a winged humanoid from the waist up, with two snake tails for legs below. Aeschylus calls Typhon "fire-breathing". For Nicander (2nd century BC), Typhon was a monster of enormous strength, and strange appearance, with many heads, hands, and wings, and with huge snake coils coming from his thighs.

Apollodorus describes Typhon as a huge winged monster, whose head "brushed the stars", human in form above the waist, with snake coils below, and fire flashing from his eyes:

In size and strength he surpassed all the offspring of Earth. As far as the thighs he was of human shape and of such prodigious bulk that he out-topped all the mountains, and his head often brushed the stars. One of his hands reached out to the west and the other to the east, and from them projected a hundred dragons' heads. From the thighs downward he had huge coils of vipers, which when drawn out, reached to his very head and emitted a loud hissing. His body was all winged: unkempt hair streamed on the wind from his head and cheeks; and fire flashed from his eyes.

Offspring

According to Hesiod's Theogony, Typhon "was joined in love" to Echidna, a monstrous half-woman and half-snake, who bore Typhon "fierce offspring". First, according to Hesiod, there was Orthrus, the two-headed dog who guarded the Cattle of Geryon, second Cerberus, the multiheaded dog who guarded the gates of Hades, and third the Lernaean Hydra, the many-headed serpent who, when one of its heads was cut off, grew two more. The Theogony next mentions an ambiguous "she", which might refer to Echidna, as the mother of the Chimera (a fire-breathing beast that was part lion, part goat, and had a snake-headed tail) with Typhon then being the father.

While mentioning Cerberus and "other monsters" as being the offspring of Echidna and Typhon, the mythographer Acusilaus (6th century BC) adds the Caucasian Eagle that ate the liver of Prometheus. The mythographer Pherecydes of Athens (5th century BC) also names Prometheus's eagle, and adds Ladon (though Pherecydes does not use this name), the dragon that guarded the golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides (according to Hesiod, the offspring of Ceto and Phorcys). The lyric poet Lasus of Hermione (6th century BC) adds the Sphinx.

Later authors mostly retain these offspring of Typhon by Echidna, while adding others. Apollodorus, in addition to naming as their offspring Orthrus, the Chimera (citing Hesiod as his source), the Caucasian Eagle, Ladon, and the Sphinx, also adds the Nemean lion (no mother is given), and the Crommyonian Sow, killed by the hero Theseus (unmentioned by Hesiod).

Hyginus (1st century BC), in his list of offspring of Typhon (all by Echidna), retains from the above: Cerberus, the Chimera, the Sphinx, the Hydra and Ladon, and adds "Gorgon" (by which Hyginus means the mother of Medusa, whereas Hesiod's three Gorgons, of which Medusa was one, were the daughters of Ceto and Phorcys), the Colchian dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece and Scylla. The Harpies, in Hesiod the daughters of Thaumas and the Oceanid Electra, in one source, are said to be the daughters of Typhon.

The sea serpents which attacked the Trojan priest Laocoön, during the Trojan War, were perhaps supposed to be the progeny of Typhon and Echidna. According to Hesiod, the defeated Typhon is the father of destructive storm winds.

Battle with Zeus

Typhon challenged Zeus for rule of the cosmos. The earliest mention of Typhon, and his only occurrence in Homer, is a passing reference in the Iliad to Zeus striking the ground around where Typhon lies defeated. Hesiod's Theogony gives the first account of their battle. According to Hesiod, without the quick action of Zeus, Typhon would have "come to reign over mortals and immortals". In the Theogony Zeus and Typhon meet in cataclysmic conflict:

[Zeus] thundered hard and mightily: and the earth around resounded terribly and the wide heaven above, and the sea and Ocean's streams and the nether parts of the earth. Great Olympus reeled beneath the divine feet of the king as he arose and earth groaned thereat. And through the two of them heat took hold on the dark-blue sea, through the thunder and lightning, and through the fire from the monster, and the scorching winds and blazing thunderbolt. The whole earth seethed, and sky and sea: and the long waves raged along the beaches round and about at the rush of the deathless gods: and there arose an endless shaking. Hades trembled where he rules over the dead below, and the Titans under Tartarus who live with Cronos, because of the unending clamor and the fearful strife.

Zeus with his thunderbolt easily overcomes Typhon, who is thrown down to earth in a fiery crash:

So when Zeus had raised up his might and seized his arms, thunder and lightning and lurid thunderbolt, he leaped from Olympus and struck him, and burned all the marvellous heads of the monster about him. But when Zeus had conquered him and lashed him with strokes, Typhoeus was hurled down, a maimed wreck, so that the huge earth groaned. And flame shot forth from the thunderstricken lord in the dim rugged glens of the mount, when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor and melted as tin melts when heated by men's art in channelled crucibles; or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is shortened by glowing fire in mountain glens and melts in the divine earth through the strength of Hephaestus. Even so, then, the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire.

Defeated, Typhon is cast into Tartarus by an angry Zeus.

Epimenides (7th or 6th century BC) seemingly knew a different version of the story, in which Typhon enters Zeus' palace while Zeus is asleep, but Zeus awakes and kills Typhon with a thunderbolt. Pindar apparently knew of a tradition which had the gods, in order to escape from Typhon, transform themselves into animals, and flee to Egypt. Pindar calls Typhon the "enemy of the gods", and says that he was defeated by Zeus' thunderbolt. In one poem Pindar has Typhon being held prisoner by Zeus under Etna, and in another says that Typhon "lies in dread Tartarus", stretched out underground between Mount Etna and Cumae. In Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, a "hissing" Typhon, his eyes flashing, "withstood all the gods", but "the unsleeping bolt of Zeus" struck him, and "he was burnt to ashes and his strength blasted from him by the lightning bolt. And now, a helpless and a sprawling bulk, he lies hard by the narrows of the sea, pressed down beneath the roots of Aetna; while on the topmost summit Hephaestus sits and hammers the molten ore. There, one day, shall burst forth [370] rivers of fire,1with savage jaws devouring the level fields of Sicily, land of fair fruit—such boiling rage shall Typho, although charred by the blazing lightning of Zeus, send spouting forth with hot jets of appalling, fire-breathing surge."

Burial and cause of volcanic activity

Most accounts have the defeated Typhon buried under either Mount Etna in Sicily, or the volcanic island of Ischia, the largest of the Phlegraean Islands off the coast of Naples, with Typhon being the cause of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

Though Hesiod has Typhon simply cast into Tartarus by Zeus, some have read a reference to Mount Etna in Hesiod's description of Typhon's fall:

And flame shot forth from the thunderstricken lord in the dim rugged glens of the mount when he was smitten. A great part of huge earth was scorched by the terrible vapor and melted as tin melts when heated by men's art in channelled crucibles; or as iron, which is hardest of all things, is shortened by glowing fire in mountain glens and melts in the divine earth through the strength of Hephaestus. Even so, then, the earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire.

The first certain references to Typhon buried under Etna, as well as being the cause of its eruptions, occur in Pindar:

Son of Cronus, you who hold Aetna, the wind-swept weight on terrible hundred-headed Typhon,

and:

among them is he who lies in dread Tartarus, that enemy of the gods, Typhon with his hundred heads. Once the famous Cilician cave nurtured him, but now the sea-girt cliffs above Cumae, and Sicily too, lie heavy on his shaggy chest. And the pillar of the sky holds him down, snow-covered Aetna, year-round nurse of bitter frost, from whose inmost caves belch forth the purest streams of unapproachable fire. In the daytime her rivers roll out a fiery flood of smoke, while in the darkness of night the crimson flame hurls rocks down to the deep plain of the sea with a crashing roar. That monster shoots up the most terrible jets of fire; it is a marvellous wonder to see, and a marvel even to hear about when men are present. Such a creature is bound beneath the dark and leafy heights of Aetna and beneath the plain, and his bed scratches and goads the whole length of his back stretched out against it.

"Couch of Typhoeus"

Homer describes a place he calls the "couch [or bed] of Typhoeus", which he locates in the land of the Arimoi (εἰν Ἀρίμοις), where Zeus lashes the land about Typhoeus with his thunderbolts. Presumably this is the same land where, according to Hesiod, Typhon's mate Echidna keeps guard "in Arima" (εἰν Ἀρίμοισιν).

But neither Homer nor Hesiod say anything more about where these Arimoi or this Arima might be. The question of whether an historical place was meant, and its possible location, has been, since ancient times, the subject of speculation and debate.

Strabo discusses the question in some detail. Several locales, Cilicia, Syria, Lydia, and the island of Ischia, all places associated with Typhon, are given by Strabo as possible locations for Homer's "Arimoi".

Pindar has his Cilician Typhon slain by Zeus "among the Arimoi", and the historian Callisthenes (4th century BC), located the Arimoi and the Arima mountains in Cilicia, near the Calycadnus river, the Corycian cave and the Sarpedon promontory. The b scholia to Iliad 2.783, mentioned above, says Typhon was born in Cilicia "under Arimon", and Nonnus mentions Typhon's "bloodstained cave of Arima" in Cilicia.

Just across the Gulf of Issus from Corycus, in ancient Syria, was Mount Kasios (modern Jebel Aqra) and the Orontes River, sites associated with Typhon's battle with Zeus, and according to Strabo, the historian Posidonius (c. 2nd century BC) identified the Arimoi with the Aramaeans of Syria.

Alternatively, according to Strabo, some placed the Arimoi at Catacecaumene, while Xanthus of Lydia (5th century BC) added that "a certain Arimus" ruled there. Strabo also tells us that for "some" Homer's "couch of Typhon" was located "in a wooded place, in the fertile land of Hyde", with Hyde being another name for Sardis (or its acropolis), and that Demetrius of Scepsis (2nd century BC) thought that the Arimoi were most plausibly located "in the Catacecaumene country in Mysia". The 3rd-century BC poet Lycophron placed the lair of Typhon's mate Echidna in this region.

Another place, mentioned by Strabo, as being associated with Arima, is the island of Ischia, where according to Pherecydes of Athens, Typhon had fled, and in the area where Pindar and others had said Typhon was buried. The connection to Arima, comes from the island's Greek name Pithecussae, which derives from the Greek word for monkey, and according to Strabo, residents of the island said that "arimoi" was also the Etruscan word for monkeys.

Name

Typhon's name has a number of variants. The earliest forms, Typhoeus and Typhaon, occur prior to the 5th century BC. Homer uses Typhoeus, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo use both Typhoeus and Typhaon. The later forms Typhos and Typhon occur from the 5th century BC onwards, with Typhon becoming the standard form by the end of that century.

Though several possible derivations of the name Typhon have been suggested, the derivation remains uncertain. Consistent with Hesiod's making storm winds Typhon's offspring, some have supposed that Typhon was originally a wind-god, and ancient sources associated him with the Greek words tuphon, tuphos meaning "whirlwind". Other theories include derivation from a Greek root meaning "smoke" (consistent with Typhon's identification with volcanoes), from an Indo-European root (*dhuH-) meaning "abyss" (making Typhon a "Serpent of the Deep"), and from Sapõn the Phoenician name for the Ugaritic god Baal's holy mountain Jebel Aqra (the classical Mount Kasios) associated with the epithet Baʿal Sapōn.

The name may have influenced the Persian word tūfān which is a source of the meteorological term typhoon.

Comparative mythology

Succession myth

The Typhonomachy—Zeus' battle with, and defeat of Typhon—is just one part of a larger "Succession Myth" given in Hesiod's Theogony. The Hesiodic succession myth describes how Uranus, the original ruler of the cosmos, hid his offspring away inside Gaia, but was overthrown by his Titan son Cronus, who castrated Uranus, and how in turn, Cronus, who swallowed his children as they were born, was himself overthrown by his son Zeus, whose mother had given Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow, in place of Zeus. However Zeus is then confronted with one final adversary, Typhon, which he quickly defeats. Now clearly the supreme power in the cosmos, Zeus is elected king of gods. Zeus then establishes and secures his realm through the apportionment of various functions and responsibilities to the other gods, and by means of marriage. Finally, by swallowing his first wife Metis, who was destined to produce a son stronger than himself, Zeus is able to put an end to the cycle of succession.

Python

Typhon's story seems related to that of another monstrous offspring of Gaia: Python, the serpent killed by Apollo at Delphi, suggesting a possible common origin.

Besides the similarity of names, their shared parentage, and the fact that both were snaky monsters killed in single combat with an Olympian god, there are other connections between the stories surrounding Typhon, and those surrounding Python.

Although the Delphic monster killed by Apollo is usually said to be the male serpent Python, in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the earliest account of this story, the god kills a nameless she-serpent (drakaina), subsequently called Delphyne, who had been Typhon's foster-mother. Delphyne and Echidna, besides both being intimately connected to Typhon—one as mother, the other as mate—share other similarities. Both were half-maid and half-snake, a plague to men, and associated with the Corycian cave in Cilicia.

Python was also perhaps connected with a different Corycian Cave than the one in Cilicia, this one on the slopes of Parnassus above Delphi, and just as the Corycian cave in Cilicia was thought to be Typhon and Echidna's lair, and associated with Typhon's battle with Zeus, there is evidence to suggest that the Corycian cave above Delphi was supposed to be Python's (or Delphyne's) lair, and associated with his (or her) battle with Apollo.

Near Eastern influence

From at least as early as Pindar, and possibly as early as Homer and Hesiod (with their references to the Arimoi and Arima), Typhon's birthplace and battle with Zeus were associated with various Near East locales in Cilicia and Syria, including the Corycian Cave, Mount Kasios, and the Orontes River. Besides this coincidence of place, the Hesiodic succession myth, (including the Typhonomachy), as well as other Greek accounts of these myths, exhibit other parallels with several ancient Near Eastern antecedents, and it is generally held that the Greek accounts are intimately connected with, and influenced by, these Near Eastern counterparts. In particular, the Typhonomachy is generally thought to have been influenced by several Near Eastern monster-slaying myths.

Three related god vs. monster combat myths from Mesopotamia, date from at least the early second-millennium BC or earlier. These are the battles of the god Ninurta with the monsters Asag and Anzu, and the god Marduk's battle with the monstrous Tiamat.

Lugal-e, a late-third-millennium BC Sumerian poem, tells the story of the battle between the Mesopotamian hero-god Ninurta and the terrible monster Asag. Like Typhon, Asag was a monstrous hissing offspring of Earth (Ki), who grew mighty and challenged the rule of Ninurta, who like Zeus, was a storm-god employing winds and floods as weapons. As in Hesiod's account of the Typhonomachy, during their battle, both Asag and Ninurta set fire to the landscape. And like Apollodorus' Typhon, Asag evidently won an initial victory, before being finally overcome by Ninurta.

The early second millennium BC Akkadian epic Anzû tells the story of another combat of Ninurta with a monstrous challenger. This second foe is the winged monster Anzû, another offspring of Earth. Like Hesiod's Typhon, Anzû roared like a lion, and was the source of destructive storm winds. Ninurta destroys Anzû on a mountainside, and is portrayed as lashing the ground where Anzû lay with a rainstorm and floodwaters, just as Homer has Zeus lash the land about Typhon with his thunderbolts.

The early second-millennium BC Babylonian-Akkadian creation epic Enūma Eliš tells the story of the battle of the Babylonian supreme god Marduk with Tiamat, the Sea personified. Like Zeus, Marduk was a storm-god, who employed wind and lightning as weapons, and who, before he can succeed to the kingship of the gods, must defeat a huge and fearsome enemy in single combat. This time the monster is female, and may be related to the Pythian dragoness Delphyne, or Typhon's mate Echidna, since like Echidna, Tiamat was the mother of a brood of monsters.

Confused with the Giants

Typhon bears a close resemblance to an older generation of descendants of Gaia, the Giants. They, like their younger brother Typhon after them, challenged Zeus for supremacy of the cosmos, were (in later representations) shown as snake-footed, and end up buried under volcanoes.

While distinct in early accounts, in later accounts Typhon was often considered to be one of the Giants. The Fabulae (c. 2nd century AD), a Latin handbook of mythology, includes Typhon in its list of Giants, while the Roman poet Horace (65 BC – 8 BC), mentions Typhon, along with the Giants Mimas, Porphyrion, and Enceladus, as together battling Athena, during the Gigantomachy. The Astronomica, attributed to the 1st-century AD Roman poet and astrologer Marcus Manilius, and the late 4th-century early 5th-century Greek poet Nonnus, also consider Typhon to be one of the Giants.