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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lambin. This is the Monster Fact,

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Speaker 2: a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

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Speaker 2: focusing in non mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time,

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Speaker 2: and the gods, givers of good things, applauded when they

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Speaker 2: heard his word, and their spirit longed for war even

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Speaker 2: more than before. And they all, both male and female,

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Speaker 2: stirred up hated battle that day, the Titan gods and

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Speaker 2: all that were born of Cronos, together with those dread

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Speaker 2: mighty ones of overwhelming strength, whom Zeus brought up to

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Speaker 2: the light from Erebus beneath the earth, A hundred arms

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Speaker 2: sprang from the shoulders of all alike, and each had

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Speaker 2: fifty heads growing upon his shoulders, upon stout limbs. These

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Speaker 2: then stood against the Titans in grim strife, holding huge

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Speaker 2: rocks in their strong hands. These are the words of

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Speaker 2: Hesiod from his eighth century BCE text Theogony, here in

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Speaker 2: translation by Evelyn White, describing the one hundred handed warriors

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Speaker 2: the hecatonkyaries of Greek mythology. Naturally, the poet Hesiod compiled

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Speaker 2: various tellings and traditions in his poetry, and in doing so,

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Speaker 2: solidified a number of characters, relationships, and tales concerning the

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Speaker 2: Greek pantheon of deities. So what we read here is

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Speaker 2: effectively the most popular understanding of the Hecatonkers. They were

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Speaker 2: a very ancient race of multi headed and multi handed giants,

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Speaker 2: and they stood among the various children of the primordial

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Speaker 2: sky god Urunas. But Urunas hated these monstrosities from the

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Speaker 2: first and imprisoned them, locking them away out of sight. Eventually,

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Speaker 2: Urunas's offspring, Chronos, rises against his father, overthrows him, but

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Speaker 2: seemingly keeps these earlier unsightly offspring locked away. It is

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Speaker 2: not until Zeus, the child of Cronos, rises up with

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Speaker 2: his fellow Olympian gods, rebels against the Titans. They free

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Speaker 2: and recruit the Hecatonkyres, as well as their kin, the Cyclopses,

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Speaker 2: into their ensuing war for control of the cosmos. This

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Speaker 2: was the Titanomachi, and Hesiod describes their role in its battles,

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Speaker 2: naming the three most prominent of the one hundred handed

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Speaker 2: warriors in surviving traditions, and amongst the foremost Cotis and Bryarias,

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Speaker 2: and guys insatiate for war, raised fierce, fighting three hundred

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Speaker 2: rocks one upon another. They launched from their strong hands

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Speaker 2: and overshadowed the Titans with their missiles, and buried them

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Speaker 2: beneath the wide pathed earth, and bound them in bitter chains.

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Speaker 2: When they had conquered them by their strength, for all

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Speaker 2: their great spirit, as far beneath the earth to Tartarus.

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Speaker 2: The Hecatonkyres, according to Hesiod, are much more than allies

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Speaker 2: of the gods. In their war against the Titans, the

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Speaker 2: Hecatonqueries strike the final blow. They chain the Titans. They

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Speaker 2: become the wardens of the Titans, and are quite ironically

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Speaker 2: imprisoned once more in the process. Now it should be

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Speaker 2: noted that in some traditions the Hecatonkures may have fought

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Speaker 2: instead on the side of the Titans, and in some compilations,

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Speaker 2: such as Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the authors

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Speaker 2: go so far as to describe individuals, specifically Bryarius as

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Speaker 2: a Titan. So it gets a bit confusing at times.

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Speaker 2: And I suppose that's how I have always felt about

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Speaker 2: the Hecatonquary since I was a child and read about them,

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Speaker 2: and various books, somewhat confused because the morphologies of so

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Speaker 2: many other Greek monsters are just so well defined, there's

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Speaker 2: so many illustrations of them. As a child, you can

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Speaker 2: draw them, you can roughly sketch them yourself, and it's

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Speaker 2: a lot of fun. But the hecatonquerris always seem to

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Speaker 2: defy logic name feels more like a literary concept describing

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Speaker 2: a force of nature as opposed to a codified creature,

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Speaker 2: and indeed this is often how they are interpreted. They

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Speaker 2: are difficult to envision or to reproduce visually, and certainly

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Speaker 2: there are plenty of contemporary artists who have had a

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Speaker 2: lot of fun producing various surreal and just horrifying interpretations

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Speaker 2: of the hecatonqurese, but one is generally hard pressed to

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Speaker 2: find representations of these creatures in art history. Now I

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Speaker 2: invite correction on this front, because I would very much

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Speaker 2: love to see such images, to see like classical illustrations,

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Speaker 2: medieval illustrations and so forth, all of the hecatonqures. But

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Speaker 2: my searches have generally come up well empty handed. Perhaps

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Speaker 2: we've simply lost ancient Greek depictions of these creatures. I

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Speaker 2: can only assume that they were too far removed from

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Speaker 2: actual human physiology to interest many sculptors. You know, I mean,

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Speaker 2: if you're interested in capturing the reality of the human form,

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Speaker 2: even in the telling of stories and the presentation of

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Speaker 2: information about deities, then this might not be your first stop.

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Speaker 2: Perhaps they were creature's best left for depiction in the

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Speaker 2: ages of surrealism and cosmic horror to come. Indeed, outside

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Speaker 2: of their role in the struggle against the Titans, little

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Speaker 2: seems to have survived about the hecatonqures in general, aside

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Speaker 2: from some tangents concerning Bryarias. Again, the Hecatonquyres are perhaps

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Speaker 2: best interpreted as embodiments of natural forces. Given their hundred

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Speaker 2: hands and heads, they are like armies of men compiled

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Speaker 2: into a single grade entity, like a storm or earthquake,

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Speaker 2: with the power of an army. As such, turning to

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Speaker 2: the natural world of biology, our best example of hundred

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Speaker 2: headed entities are actually large groups working together, such as

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Speaker 2: humans or use social insects. Now, some of you out

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Speaker 2: there might be thinking to yourself, well, I know what

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Speaker 2: has one hundred appendages? Well, even centipedes, despite their name

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Speaker 2: which means one hundred footed never have exactly one hundred

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Speaker 2: e limbs. They may have as few as some like

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Speaker 2: twenty three leg bearing segments, or as many as I

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Speaker 2: think one hundred and ninety one, but there is always

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Speaker 2: an odd number of leg bearing segments, never the even

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Speaker 2: fifty segments that would produce a total of one hundred legs.

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Speaker 2: By the way, the first millipede with more than a

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Speaker 2: thousand legs wasn't discovered till twenty twenty one. Now, despite

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Speaker 2: this disappointment, scientists have fouled room to invoke the hecatonkres

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Speaker 2: in the naming of various organisms. Specifically, the name Bryarius

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Speaker 2: is invoked in the scientific name for various organisms, including,

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Speaker 2: but not limited to, the Caribbean reef octopus, the hairy

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Speaker 2: c cucumber, at least one species of sea star, the

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Speaker 2: qirky seafinger, coral, a sea slug, an extinct trilabite, and

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Speaker 2: a Central American moth. As for their mythic namesake, the hecatonkyres, well,

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Speaker 2: maybe we should heed the words ohesiate once more. Perhaps

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Speaker 2: we lack for older depictions of the creature because they

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Speaker 2: are not to be approached, They are not to be

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Speaker 2: looked upon, even Uruanas chose not to do so, and

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Speaker 2: he used to hide them all away in a secret

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Speaker 2: place of earth so soon as each was born, and

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Speaker 2: would not suffer them to come up into the light.

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Speaker 2: And Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing, but vast earth

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Speaker 2: groaned within. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster, Fact,

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Speaker 2: The Artifact, or Anamalia Stupendium each week. As always, you

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Speaker 2: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your

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Speaker 2: Mind dot com.

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