Gyes (Gyges)

Gyes (GY-jeez) — the same figure the later tradition spells Gyges (this site keeps the id "gyges," though Hesiod's primary form is Gyes) — is the third-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, also called Aegaeon) and Cottus, he was a being of immense and terrible power: a hundred arms springing from his shoulders and fifty heads, a strength (Hesiod says) beyond telling or approaching. He should not be confused with the historical Lydian king of the same later name.

Gyes 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 Titanomachy, 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, and his brother Cottus cross-links it as well; here it is glimpsed from Gyes's own angle. Of the three brothers Gyes is the least individualized in the sources — he has no separate speech like Cottus, and no second life among the sea-gods like Briareus — and that very plainness makes him the purest example of what the Hundred-Handers are: raw, elemental, loyal strength.

After the war Gyes took the same station as Cottus: one of the two faithful wardens at the gates of Tartarus, standing guard over the very Titans the brothers had defeated. He is the primeval strength of the earth turned keeper — the force that could have unmade the cosmos, set instead to hold its enemies in the dark forever, and to guarantee the order of Zeus.

Third of the primeval children

In Hesiod's Theogony, Gaia (Earth) bears to Ouranos (Sky) the three Hundred-Handers before all the other gods: Kottos, Briareos, and Gyes, each with a hundred arms and fifty heads. Their father hated them from birth and hid them away in the depths of the earth, pressing them back into Gaia's own body so that they never rose into the light, and Earth groaned within at the outrage. When the Titan Cronus overthrew Ouranos and took the sovereignty, the brothers were bound again and cast into Tartarus, the deepest pit below the world, where Gyes lay chained through the long reign of the Titans. (The full story is told on the page of Briareus; Cottus cross-links it too.)

Freed for the war

When Zeus rose against the Titans and the war ran on for ten years, Gaia counselled him that the side which won the imprisoned giants would win the war. Zeus went down and freed the three Hundred-Handers, reviving them with nectar and ambrosia until their spirit returned; Cottus answered for all three with a pledge of loyalty, and Gyes stood with his brothers, ready for the fight. Where Cottus is given the words, Gyes is given the deed — he is strength without speech, one of the three vast bodies now arrayed on Zeus's side.

The three hundred boulders

In the battle the brothers took the front, and each hurled a hundred rocks in swift succession — three hundred boulders at once — burying the Titans beneath the volley while Zeus's thunderbolts flashed above. The earth and sky shook to their roots, and the Titans were broken and driven down. Gyes's hundred hands were a third of that decisive, war-winning strength: the elemental power of Earth's primeval children, thrown into the scale on the side of the new order.

Warden at the gate

Gyes's reward, like Cottus's, was his post. When the Titans were shut behind the bronze wall and gates that Poseidon set in Tartarus, Hesiod names Gyes and Cottus as the trusted guards stationed there at the edge of the world, keeping watch over the fallen gods forever. (Only Briareus was set apart, married into the family of the sea.) So Gyes ends the story as a sentinel of the pit — the primeval strength that helped defeat the Titans, standing eternal guard over their prison, part of the machinery that keeps the cosmos of Zeus secure.

A primeval power, not a god of cult

Gyes 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 or festival was his. (Of the three brothers, only Briareus, in his guise as the sea-power Aegaeon, drew any genuine cult, on the island of Euboea.) Rather than invent a devotion, the honest thing is to report what Gyes carried for the Greeks: not ritual, but meaning.

The meaning of the myth

Gyes belongs to the Greek image of the oldest and strongest forces of the earth — powers older than the Olympians and, in sheer strength, greater — whose significance is that they are bound, released, and then set to work upholding Zeus's order rather than overthrowing it. His hundred hands help win the Titanomachy; his body stands guard over the imprisoned Titans. In him, perhaps most plainly of the three (since he is given no speech and no second story), 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 held in place.

Reception and legacy, not cult

There is no modern cult of Gyes, and none is invented here. His afterlife, like his brothers', is one of reception: he lives on as part of the collective image of the Hecatoncheires, the hundred-handed giants who won the war of the gods, wherever the trio appears in modern retellings of Greek myth — in books, art, games, and fiction.

The two spellings, and a caution

Gyes's chief peculiarity in modern reception is his name. The older, primary form Gyes (Hesiod's spelling) is often replaced by the later Gyges, and this second spelling causes a persistent confusion: the Hundred-Hander Gyges is entirely distinct from the famous Lydian king Gyges of Herodotus and of Plato's "ring of Gyges" story, with whom he has nothing to do beyond the accident of a shared later spelling. Beyond that, Gyes is rarely singled out from his brothers; his legacy is the shared one of the Hecatoncheires — the "hundred-handed" as an image of overwhelming, many-armed power, and a reminder that the order of the Greek cosmos was secured by the older, monstrous powers of the earth as much as by the gods themselves.