Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Briareus.
The gallery
Thetis Calling Briareus to Aid Zeus (Iliad I.402)
John Flaxman, 1793
John Flaxman's neoclassical line engraving illustrates the episode Thetis recounts to Achilles in Iliad I.396-406: when Hera, Poseidon and Athena conspired to bind Zeus, Thetis summoned the hundred-handed giant Briareus, whom the gods call Aegaeon, to Olympus, where his sheer strength so overawed the rebels that they abandoned the plot. Briareus is shown as the towering, many-armed defender of Zeus's rule, the rare Homeric moment in which a Hecatoncheir appears as the gods' ally rather than their primordial weapon against the Titans.
Dante and Virgil Observing Ephialtes and Briareus (Inferno XXXI)
Anonimo napoletano (Neapolitan illuminator), ca. 1370
A fourteenth-century Neapolitan manuscript illumination to Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXI, in which the giants of myth are chained around the central pit of Hell. Dante and Virgil look on Ephialtes and Briareo (Briareus) before Antaeus lowers them toward the frozen lake of Cocytus. Medieval and Renaissance readers inherited Briareus from the classical poets as the archetypal hundred-armed giant of cosmic rebellion, and Dante places him among the impious Titans and Giants punished for their assault on heaven.
Briareos (Spandrel Figure, Natural History Museum Vienna)
Hugo Haerdtl, 1889
A carved spandrel (Zwickelfigur) by the sculptor Hugo Haerdtl on the Bellariastrasse avant-corps of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. Within a programme of mythological figures, Briareos appears as the hundred-handed son of Uranus and Gaia, embodying the primordial, earth-born forces of nature appropriate to a museum of natural history. The figure continues the long iconographic tradition of representing the Hecatoncheir as a colossus of immense, many-limbed strength.