Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Ephialtes.
The gallery
Otus and Ephialtes Holding Ares Captive (illustration to Homer's Iliad)
John Flaxman (engraved by Tommaso Piroli), 1793 (drawing); engraved 1795
In this spare Neoclassical outline engraving from Flaxman's celebrated series illustrating the Iliad, the giant Aloadae brothers Otus and Ephialtes appear in the act for which they were most notorious: the chaining of the war-god Ares. The episode comes from Iliad 5.385-391, where Dione reminds Aphrodite that Ares once 'lay bound in a brazen jar for thirteen months' until Hermes secretly freed him. Flaxman reduces the violent myth to pure contour, the towering twin sons of Aloeus framing the bound god in the clean, classicizing line that made these prints, engraved by Tommaso Piroli, hugely influential across Romantic-era Europe.
Diana Between Two Giants (Diane entre deux géants)
Designed by Toussaint Dubreuil, c. 1620-1630
This early seventeenth-century tapestry at the Château de Chambord, woven after a design by the French court painter Toussaint Dubreuil, sets the goddess Diana (Artemis) between the two Aloadae giants, Otus and Ephialtes. It illustrates the ruse by which the brothers met their end: according to Apollodorus, when the giants threatened the gods and demanded Hera and Artemis as brides, Artemis darted between them in the form of a deer, and the twins, hurling their spears at the quarry, struck and killed one another. The composition crystallizes the deadly trick into a single emblematic image, the huntress-goddess flanked by the doomed mountain-piling brothers, Ephialtes among them.
The Titans and Giants (Inferno, Canto XXXI), with Ephialtes
Gustave Doré, 1861
Gustave Doré's engraving for Canto XXXI of Dante's Inferno shows the chained giants who ring the lowest pit of Hell, among them Ephialtes, one of the Aloadae, named on the left of the composition. Dante places the mountain-piling rebel here precisely because of the myth recorded by Homer and others, in which Ephialtes and his twin Otus heaped Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa in their assault on the gods; for that primordial impiety the medieval poet binds him for eternity. Doré's dramatic chiaroscuro renders the colossal figure looming over the tiny pilgrims Dante and Virgil, fixing the giant's hubris in the Romantic visual imagination.