Cottus

Cottus (KOT-us) is the first-named of the three Hundred-Handers (Greek Hekatoncheires, "hundred-handed ones"), one of the monstrous primeval children of Sky and Earth. With his brothers Briareus (the greatest of the three, called also Aegaeon) and Gyes/Gyges, he was a being of immense and terrible power: a hundred arms springing from his shoulders and fifty heads, a strength (Hesiod says) that could not be told or approached.

Cottus shares the whole arc of the trio's story — hated by their father and forced back into the earth, later bound in Tartarus by Cronus, and at last freed by Zeus to fight in the war against the Titans, where the three brothers' hundred hands hurled three hundred boulders at once and broke the older gods. The fullest telling of that shared story belongs to Briareus's page; here it is glimpsed from Cottus's own angle. And Cottus has one moment that is entirely his: when Zeus lifted the brothers out of the dark, it was Cottus who answered for all three, speaking the words of gratitude and loyalty that seal their alliance with the new king of heaven.

After the war Cottus took his lasting station. Where Briareus was drawn off into the world of the sea-gods, Cottus remained one of the two faithful wardens at the gates of Tartarus, standing guard with Gyes over the very Titans they had defeated. He is the primeval strength of the earth turned keeper — the elemental force that could have unmade the cosmos, set instead to hold its enemies in the dark forever.

Eldest of Earth, hidden away

In Hesiod's Theogony, Gaia (Earth) bears to Ouranos (Sky) three monstrous sons before all the other gods: Kottos, Briareos, and Gyes, the Hundred-Handers, each with a hundred arms and fifty heads. Their father hated them from birth and would not let them into the light — he pressed them back down into the hollow of Gaia's own body, and Earth groaned within at the outrage. When the Titan Cronus later overthrew Ouranos and seized the sovereignty, the brothers were not freed but bound again and thrust into Tartarus, the deepest pit below the world, where Cottus lay chained through the long reign of the Titans. (The full sweep of the tale is told on the page of Briareus; his brother Gyes/Gyges cross-links it too.)

Freed by Zeus — and Cottus speaks

When Zeus made war on the Titans and the fighting dragged on ten years, Gaia counselled him that victory would come to whichever side won the imprisoned giants. Zeus went down and loosed the three Hundred-Handers from their bonds, reviving them with nectar and ambrosia. And here Cottus has his own moment in the myth: he answered Zeus for all three brothers, saying that he knew well it was by Zeus's wisdom that they had been brought back up out of the pitiless dark and their cruel chains, and that now, with steadfast and deliberate purpose, they would defend his rule in the terrible battle. It is one of the few speeches any monster is given in Greek myth, and it is a speech of pure loyalty — Cottus is the voice of the trio's gratitude.

The boulders that broke the Titans

Then the three brothers took the front of the battle. Each of them, Hesiod says, hurled a hundred rocks in swift succession — three hundred boulders at once — and buried the Titans under the storm of missiles while Zeus's thunderbolts flashed overhead. The earth and the wide sky shook, and the Titans were broken and driven down below. The elemental strength of Cottus and his brothers, not the Olympians alone, won the war and secured the order of the cosmos.

Warden at the gate

Cottus's reward was also his post. The defeated Titans were shut behind the bronze wall and gates of Tartarus that Poseidon set, and Hesiod names Cottus and Gyes as the faithful guards stationed there at the edge of the world, keeping watch over the fallen gods forever. (Briareus alone was set apart, married to Poseidon's daughter and drawn into the myths of the sea.) So Cottus's part in the story ends where the cosmos is made secure: the primeval power that helped defeat the Titans stands sentinel over their prison, a warden of the pit for all time.

A primeval power, not a god of cult

Cottus received no worship — he is one of the monstrous elder beings, a primeval force rather than a god of the ordinary pantheon, and no altar was raised to him. (Only his brother Briareus, in his second guise as the sea-power Aegaeon, drew any genuine cult, and that on the island of Euboea.) Reporting this honestly, rather than inventing a devotion, is the point here: what Cottus carried for the Greeks was meaning, not ritual.

The meaning of the myth

Cottus belongs to the Greek image of the oldest and strongest forces of the earth — powers older than the Olympians and, in raw strength, greater — whose whole significance is that they are bound, released, and then set to work upholding Zeus's order rather than tearing it down. His hands help win the Titanomachy; his body stands guard over the imprisoned Titans; his speech of loyalty seals the alliance that makes Zeus's victory possible. In him and his brothers the Greeks pictured the vast, half-buried strength at the foundation of the world on which the rule of heaven is built and by which it is kept secure.

Reception and legacy, not cult

There is no modern cult of Cottus, and none is invented here. His afterlife, like his brothers', is one of reception: he lives on as part of the great collective image of the Hecatoncheires, the hundred-handed giants who won the war of the gods. Where the trio appears in modern retellings of Greek myth — in books, art, games, and fiction — Cottus stands among them as the loyal first brother, the one who spoke for all three before the throne of Zeus.

Part of a shared image

Cottus is rarely singled out in modern reception the way Briareus is (whose second name, Aegaeon, even labels a moon of Saturn). His legacy is bound up with the group: the "hundred-handed" as a picture of overwhelming, many-armed power, and the Hecatoncheires as the elemental muscle behind Zeus's victory. To read Cottus today is to be reminded that the order of the Greek cosmos was won not by the gods alone but by the older, monstrous powers of the earth — and that at least one of those powers, given the choice, chose loyalty.