Text
Zeus slaying Typhon in Hesiod’s account is a parallel to the Mesopotamian and Hurro-Hittite conflict myths.
Homer, Iliad 2.781-783:
The earth groaned beneath them as under Zeus whose sport is thunder in his anger, when he lashes the earth over Typhon among the Arimoi, where they say Typhon has his couch.
Hesiod, Theogony 820-880:
But when Zeus had driven the Titans from heaven, huge Earth bare her youngest child, Typhon of the love of Tartarus, by the aid of golden Aphrodite. From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvellous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud, ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear; and again, at another, he would hiss so that the high mountains re-echoed … But Zeus raised up his might and seized his arms, thunder and lightning and the lurid thunderbolt; he leaped from Olympus and struck him, and burned all the marvellous heads of the monster … Typhon was hurled down, a maimed wreck, so that the huge earth groaned … And flame shot forth from the thunder-struck lord in the dim, rugged glens of the mount when he was smitten.
Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Hesiod, Theogony 820-880
Homer, Iliad 2.781-783
Bibliography
| Annus 2002, 176-182 | Annus, Amar. The God Ninurta in the Mythology and Royal Ideology of Ancient Mesopotamia. State Archives of Assyria Studies 14. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Coprus Project 2002. |
| Lonsdale 1979, 157-158 | Lonsdale, Steven H. “Attitudes towards Animals in Ancient Greece.” Greece and Rome 26 (1979) 146-159. [JSTOR (requires subscription)] |
| West 1997, 300-304 | West, Martin L. The East Face of Helicon. West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997. |
Links (external links will open in a new browser window)
Cf. Zeus and Typhon (2)
Amar Annus
URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000243.php
|
