Typhon, also called Typhoeus, was the youngest child of Earth and Tartarus, a monstrous storm-dragon who rose against Zeus for the throne of heaven and, blasted by the thunderbolt, was hurled down a maimed wreck.1
When Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven, huge Earth bore her youngest child Typhoeus to Tartarus, by the aid of golden Aphrodite. From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon with dark flickering tongues; from beneath the brows of his eyes fire flashed, and in all his dreadful heads were voices uttering every kind of sound.2
Apollodorus sets his birth in Cilicia and makes him a hybrid of man and beast who in size and strength surpassed all the children of Earth — the last and mightiest revolt of Gaia against the new order of the gods.3
Zeus leapt from Olympus and smote him, burning away the monster's heads; and when the god had conquered him and lashed him with strokes, Typhoeus was hurled down a maimed wreck, so that the huge earth groaned and a great part of it was scorched by the terrible vapour.4
Apollodorus tells how, as the beast fled through the Sicilian sea, Zeus cast Mount Etna upon him, and to this day the blasts of fire from the buried thunderbolts break out of the mountain; Ovid likewise pins his giant limbs beneath Sicily, Etna weighing down his head, while he strains in vain to rise.5
Joined with Echidna, Typhon became the sire of the monstrous brood. Apollodorus names among their children the two-headed hound Orthrus that watched the cattle of Geryon, and the hundred-headed dragon, speaking with many sorts of voices, that guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides; with Hyginus he makes the same pair parents of Cerberus, the Lernaean Hydra, the Chimera, the Sphinx, and the Nemean Lion.6
Hyginus too lists Cerberus, the Lernaean Hydra, the Chimera, the Sphinx, and the Nemean Lion among the children of Typhon and Echidna, and reckons Cerberus three-headed where Hesiod, who counts the brood as Echidna's, gives him fifty heads; Hesiod likewise makes the Sphinx and the Lion the offspring of Echidna by her own son Orthrus rather than of Typhon.7
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
