Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Otus.
The gallery
Otus and Ephialtes Holding Mars (Ares) Captive
Tommaso Piroli, after John Flaxman, 1793–1795
An outline engraving from John Flaxman's celebrated series illustrating Homer's Iliad, drawn in 1793 and engraved by Tommaso Piroli in 1795. It depicts the episode from Iliad V in which the giant twin sons of Iphimedia, Otus and his brother Ephialtes, overpower the war-god Ares and bind him inside a bronze storage jar, where he languishes for thirteen months until Hermes frees him. Flaxman's spare, linear neoclassical style—pure contour without shading—made these compositions instantly famous across Europe and gives the Aloadae's defiance of Olympus a clean, sculptural monumentality.
Diane entre deux géants (Diana Between Two Giants)
Tapestry after a design by Toussaint Dubreuil, c. 1620–1630
A seventeenth-century French tapestry preserved at the Château de Chambord, woven after a design attributed to the court painter Toussaint Dubreuil. The hanging shows the goddess Diana (Artemis) flanked by two towering giants—the Aloadae, Otus and Ephialtes—who, in the version told by Apollodorus, pursued and threatened the goddess. The scene evokes the trap on the island of Naxos, where Artemis darted between the brothers in the form of a deer so that, hurling their spears at the fleeing animal, they struck and killed one another.
The Giants (Inferno, Canto XXXI)
Gustave Doré, 1861
An engraving from Gustave Doré's monumental illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, depicting the ring of chained giants who guard the lowest pit of Hell in Inferno, Canto XXXI. Among them Dante places Ephialtes, twin of Otus and one of the Aloadae who heaped Ossa upon Pelion to scale the heavens; for that primordial assault on the gods he is bound in eternal fetters. Doré renders the colossal, manacled figures looming over the pilgrim Dante and Virgil in dramatic chiaroscuro, carrying the giants' ancient hubris into a Christian underworld.