We tend to picture the Titanomachy as a clash of armies, old gods against young gods, with thunder in the background. I want to push on that picture, because when you read how Hesiod actually tells it, most of the interesting events happen before and after any fighting. The war is ten years of stalemate. What breaks the stalemate isn't a bigger weapon. It's a series of well-timed defections and a smart bit of hiring, and I think that tells you more about the nature of Zeus's rule than any thunderbolt.
A war inside one family
Start with the awkward fact that nobody in this war is a stranger. Zeus is the grandson of Uranus and Gaia, and so are the Titans he is fighting. His father is Cronus, his mother is Rhea, and she is herself a Titan. When Zeus's side climbs Mount Olympus and the other side holds Mount Othrys, they are two parts of one family shouting at each other across northern Greece. Both mountains are in Thessaly. You could, on a clear day, have watched it from either.
Hesiod describes the noise. The boundless sea rang terribly around, the earth groaned, the wide sky was shaken and moaned, and high Olympus trembled from its foundations. The shaking was so strong that it reached down to Tartarus. Then he adds that nothing could stop it, for ten whole years, and neither side gave way. I suspect that when the poem says the fighting was evenly matched, it is telling us what the audience already assumed: that you can't beat your own relatives by force alone.
The first defection
Here is the part I like best. Before the battle, Zeus called the gods to Olympus and made a promise. He said that anyone who fought with him against the Titans would keep the honours they already had, and that anyone who had no honour under Cronus would receive one from him. It is, as far as I can tell, the first policy statement in Greek mythology. It is also a bribe.
The first to arrive was Styx. She was the daughter of Oceanus, and she came to Olympus with her children, whose names are Zelus, Nike, Kratos and Bia, which mean Zeal, Victory, Strength and Force. Zeus honoured her enormously for it. He made her oath the greatest oath that a god could take, and he kept her children near him for good.
Look at that list again. Victory is a Titan's daughter. Strength and Force, the two things you might suppose were the new regime's own inventions, come over from the other side. Zeus won the war partly by recruiting the very qualities that win wars. That is the sort of joke the poem doesn't announce, and I enjoy it.
Other Titans kept their places. Hecate, whose father Perses was a Titan, was honoured by Zeus above all, and Hesiod gives her a long passage on the gifts she kept. Helios, Selene and Eos, the children of the Titan Hyperion, carried on driving the sun, the moon and the dawn, and nobody suggested replacing them. Leto, a Titan's daughter, became the mother of Apollo and Artemis, who are arguably the most celebrated children on Olympus. So when people say Zeus overthrew the Titans, I'd say he overthrew some of them. The sky and its lights stayed in Titan hands, and the best known of the next generation came from a Titaness.
The prisoners who ended it
The deadlock broke when Zeus released the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers. Uranus had locked them away, and Cronus, who could have freed them, left them where they were. Gaia told Zeus that he would win if he brought them up, so he went down into the dark and, in a later account, killed their jailer, a she-monster named Campe, and set them free. He fed them nectar and ambrosia and told them what he wanted.
The Cyclopes gave him thunder, lightning and the thunderbolt. They gave Poseidon his trident and Hades a helmet that made him invisible. The Hundred-Handers, named Cottus, Briareus and Gyges, picked up boulders in all of their hands and threw three hundred at a time. The Titans were buried under the stones and tied up in bitter chains.
Now look at it from a strategic angle. Cronus had control of the sky and the throne, and he had the only people who could make a decisive weapon, and he refused to use them. His father's policy, which he inherited and continued, was to lock up whoever frightened him. Zeus's innovation was to let them out and ask what they needed. In other words, the victory goes to the side that is prepared to work with people who are scary.
The jailer who used to be a prisoner
Here is the twist I find most telling. Afterwards, the Titans needed to be kept somewhere, and Hesiod gives a description of Tartarus that is almost an architect's note. It is as far below the earth as the sky is above it. A bronze anvil falling from heaven would take nine days and nine nights to reach the earth, and on the tenth it would arrive in Tartarus. Poseidon fixed bronze gates in the prison, and a wall ran all around.
And who guards it? The Hundred-Handers. The beings who had been locked up by one regime were now given the job of locking up the previous one, and they took it. Briareus was even married to one of Poseidon's daughters. Hesiod doesn't comment on the irony, but I think a Greek listener would have seen it right away. The system for imprisoning people is run by people who were once imprisoned, and who got their release only because the new boss needed them.
What the war really settled
So what did the war change? On the surface, who sat on the throne. But I think it also changed how the throne worked. Cronus and Uranus ruled by holding everything close. Whatever was powerful, they put away. Zeus ruled by distributing. He drew lots with his brothers for sky, sea and the dead, he promised honours to the allies who fought for him, and in the Theogony he spends a good deal of the poem handing out portions to everyone who matters.
That is a real change of style. The earlier kings were afraid of a successor. Zeus builds a coalition so that he doesn't have one. It also means that when you read later stories, the Olympian court looks like a negotiated settlement and not a dynasty. Everyone has a share, and everyone can complain if they feel they've been shortchanged, which they do constantly.
The cost
None of this makes the winners gentle. The Titans are chained in the dark for good, and Atlas is sent to hold the sky on his shoulders at the edge of the world. Prometheus, who had sided with Zeus in the war, will fall out with him a few generations later over fire. The promise of honours turns out to have limits. That, in my reading, is the last lesson of the Titanomachy. A regime built on recruitment works as long as the recruits feel they are getting a fair share. When they don't, you will have to fight someone, and in a family like this one, it will always be a relative.