Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Typhon.
The gallery
Zeus Battling Typhon (Chalcidian Black-Figure Hydria, Side B)
Unknown (attributed to a Chalcidian vase-painter), c. 550–530 BC
The most famous ancient image of the storm-monster, this black-figure Chalcidian hydria shows Zeus striding forward to hurl his thunderbolt against a winged, snake-legged Typhon. The monster's lower body coils into two great serpents, giving visual form to Hesiod's youngest child of Gaia and Tartarus who challenged Zeus for the throne of heaven (Theogony 820–868). The painter captures the decisive moment of the Olympian theomachy that ended with Typhon blasted by lightning and, in Apollodorus' telling, buried beneath Mount Etna. Now in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich (inv. 596).
Typhon (from a series of the Greek gods)
Wenceslaus Hollar, 17th century (1607–1677)
An etching by the Bohemian printmaker Wenceslaus Hollar, part of a series illustrating figures of Greek mythology. Typhon is rendered in the early-modern emblematic manner as a monstrous, winged composite creature, reflecting the Renaissance reception of the ancient sources that cast him as the most terrible of Gaia's offspring and the father, by Echidna, of a brood of monsters. Hollar's print translates the archaic serpent-giant into the engraver's vocabulary of fantastical beasts.
Typhon, from Oedipus Aegyptiacus
Athanasius Kircher, 1652
An engraved illustration from Athanasius Kircher's monumental Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652), in which the Jesuit polymath interprets Typhon through the lens of his comparative Egyptian-Greek mythology, syncretizing the Greek storm-giant with the Egyptian destructive god Set. The plate presents Typhon as a fearsome winged and serpentine figure, embodying the chaotic, destructive force that the ancient theogonies set against the ordered cosmos of Zeus.
In play
Typhoon
English typhoon carries Typhon's storm — the hundred-headed challenger of Zeus as the word for a spinning Pacific disaster.
Hades II
Supergiant Games
Supergiant's sequel brings Typhon into Melinoë's war — the father of monsters as an endgame force pressing on the underworld.