Enceladus was one of the mightiest of the Gigantes — a giant who fought against the gods in the Gigantomachy and was buried, still living, beneath the island of Sicily, where his restless writhing was said to cause the earthquakes and the fiery eruptions of Mount Etna. He is the giant who became a volcano, his struggle beneath the earth felt to this day.
The Giant of the Gigantomachy
Enceladus was a son of Gaia (born, like his brother Gigantes, of the Earth) and one of the leaders of the giants in their war against Olympus. In the great battle he was opposed by the goddess Athena — and when at last he turned to flee, she pursued him and hurled upon him the entire island of Sicily, crushing him beneath its enormous weight. So the war-god of the giants was not so much killed as imprisoned, pinned forever under the land.
Buried Beneath Etna
Trapped alive beneath Sicily, Enceladus could never rest. The Greeks and Romans explained the island's violent geology by his struggles: when the giant shifted his vast bruised body, the ground shook in earthquakes; and the flames of Mount Etna were said to be the fiery breath he exhaled from beneath the mountain, or the fire of Zeus's thunderbolt that still smouldered in his wounds. Every eruption was the imprisoned giant stirring; every tremor was Enceladus trying, in vain, to break free.
The Restless Prisoner of the Earth
The image of Enceladus is one of the most powerful in Greek myth's explanation of the natural world. Where the Titan Atlas held up the sky and Prometheus was chained to a peak, Enceladus was pinned beneath an island — a living being so vast and so restless that an entire mountain's fire and an entire region's earthquakes were merely the symptoms of his unending struggle. He made the violence of the earth itself into a story of a defeated but undying enemy of the gods.
The Giant in the Volcano
Enceladus endures as the giant beneath the mountain — his name now given to a moon of Saturn and to the deep wells of fire and quake in the earth. He embodies the ancient intuition that the restless, fiery violence of the ground beneath our feet is something alive and imprisoned, a vast old power that lost its war against heaven but never, quite, gave up the fight.
Sicily's every earthquake and Etna's every eruption were, to the ancients, the same thing: a buried giant turning in his sleep, still trying to rise.