HE THONG'S GIANT STUDIES: October 2010

Although not among the famous Twelve Labours of Hercules, the killing of the giant Antaeus was one of the most formidable adventures of the mythological Greek hero. Antaeus, the son of Poseidon and Gaia, lived in the deserts of Libya. He killed by-passers and collected their skulls, to build out of them a temple to his divine father. Antaeus was immortal while touching the Earth -his mother- but lifted into the air he became as vulnerable as any ordinary man. Hercules discovered the secret of the giant's power and, holding him aloft, crushed him in a bearhug.

According to the Greek-Roman historian Plutarch, the giant Antaeus was 60 cubit (26 meter, 80 feet) tall. Plutarch reports that the Roman commander Quintus Sertorius discovered Antaeus's bones during an expedition to Tingis (Tangier, Morocco) in ca. 81 BC.

Nothing is said in the legends on how a normal-height hero as Hercules managed to hold Antaeus into the air in order to kill him. We may assume that by virtue of some prodigious transformation -probably performed by command of the hero's almighty father Zeus- Hercules temporarily acquired a height similar to Antaeus's.

The following images portrait Hercules in his newly acquired height, and his lover Iolaus... who in the meantime remained just a normal man.

It is not well-known that classical authors attributed gigantic heights to ancient Greek heroes.

In his work Heroikos ("On Heroes", ca. AD 230), the sophist Philostratus the Lemnian addresses the general belief that ancient heroes averaged more than 10 cubits -equivalent to more than 4 meters or 12 feet- in height. Philostratus mentions, as an empirical evidence for giant heroes, the findings of enormous bones in the places where the heroes' tombs were traditionally assumed to lie.

On the basis of the sizes of those bones, Philostratus states that, for instance, Orestes -one of Agamemnon 's children- reached 3 meters or 10 feet; Ajax -king of Salamis and a principal character in Homer's Iliad- was not less that 4.5 meters or 15 feet tall; and Achilles -the greatest warrior of the Trojan war, according to Homer- was a colossus 10 meter or 33 feet in height.

The following figure shows a comparison of the height of these three heroes with each other and with a normal modern man (1.8 m or 6 ft).

From a normal man's perspective, the three giants should have looked as shown below.

It is now believed that Philostratus's accounts should have been inspired by the discovery of fossil bones of big Tertiary mammals -such as mammooths or extinct rhinoceroses- which are still frequent in several locations of the Greek Mediterranean. This historical explanation doesn't prevent us to imagine some scenes featuring Philostratus's giant heroes and normal men, as in the following pictures.