Meaning of Hecatoncheires | Babel Free

Definitions

Three monstrous giants of enormous size and strength, each with fifty heads and one hundred arms, who were offspring of Uranus by Gaia, whom Zeus freed from captivity and who in return aided the Olympians in the Titanomachy.

Greek, plural, plural-only

Equivalents

Examples

“The three Hecatoncheires were named Cottus, Briareus (or Aegaeon) and Gyges (or Gyes).”

“1840, George Cornewall Lewis (translator), John William Donaldson (translator, later chapters), Karl Otfried Müller, History of the Literature of Ancient Greece: To the Period of Isocrates, Robert Baldwin, page 92, […] nor is it until the poet has related how Zeus set free these Hecatoncheires, by the advice of the Earth, that we are introduced to the battle with the Titans, which has already been some time going on.”

“But then Zeus went down to Tartarus and released the Cyclopes and the hundred-handed monsters. The Cyclopes awarded Zeus their weapons of thunder and lightning, and the Hecatoncheires pelted the Titans with boulders.”

“1993, Tim Parks (translator), Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, [1988, R. Calasso, Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia], Random House (Vintage), page 202, By this time many beings had spread out across space, both on high and below: the Titans, the Cyclopes, the Hecatoncheires.”

CEFR level