Curated playlist
Children of Gaia
- CoeusLatona, that Titaness whom Coeus sired, whoever he may be. Ovid in Metamorphoses VI.185 poses this question about a figure who played no active part in Greek mythology. He appears only in lists of Titans such as Hesiod's Theogony 133 or…
- Phoebe (Titaness)Phoebe carries an epithet in Hesiod's Theogony that rarely gets much attention: khrysostephanos, golden-crowned. It is one of the few vivid details attached to a Titan who mostly stays offstage in her own myths. She is one of the Titans,…
- Rhea (mythology)Rhea handed Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, and he swallowed it whole. The ruler of the cosmos had just been deceived by his own wife. The infant he believed he had consumed was already hidden in a cave on the island of Crete.…
- CronusCronus, leader of the Titans and ruler of the mythological Golden Age, was the deity Greeks credited with bringing the harvest and feared for devouring his own children. He overthrew his father Uranus by castrating him with a stone sickle,…
- Uranus (mythology)Uranus is one of the oldest divine figures in Greek religion, a being so ancient and so vast that he was not a god who ruled the sky but the sky itself. In Hesiod's Theogony, the foundational text that Greeks came to treat as the standard…
- TriptolemusA young boy named Triptolemus lay sick in the palace of Eleusis. Demeter, disguised as an old woman named Doso, found him weak and dying. She fed him her own breast milk to restore his strength. Then she placed him upon the hot coals of a…
- ThemisThemis, the Greek goddess of divine law, had a name the scholar Moses Finley called "untranslatable." Writing about Homer's use of the word in the 8th century BCE, Finley found it could mean "right custom, proper procedure, social order."…
- TartarusTartarus sits at the very bottom of the Greek cosmos. Hesiod put a number on its depth: a bronze anvil falling from heaven would need nine days to reach the earth. Nine more days would carry it from there to Tartarus. Zeus, in the Iliad,…
- Tethys (mythology)In the ancient Greek cosmos, Tethys emerged as one of the Titans, the children born from the union of Uranus and Gaia. Hesiod lists her among twelve siblings including Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis,…
- CriusAncient Greek speakers used the word krios to describe a ram. The same syllables also formed kreios, which meant a type of mussel in that language. Scholars cannot agree on which meaning applies to this Titan. Some sources point to the…
- ErinyesThe Erinyes live in Erebus, older than any Olympian god, and their job is to make sure no oath goes unpunished. A formulaic curse in the Iliad names them directly as the forces that take vengeance underground on anyone who swears falsely.…
- HecatoncheiresThe Hecatoncheires were three giants so extreme in their form that the ancient Greeks had to invent a new word to name them. Each had fifty heads and one hundred arms. Their collective title comes from the Greek hekaton, meaning "hundred",…
- OceanusOceanus once heard himself mocked by his own kin: "How did you summon courage to quit the stream that bears your name and the rock-roofed caves you yourself have made...?" Ancient Greek storytellers made Oceanus a Titan, child of Uranus,…
- MnemosyneMnemosyne was a Titaness in Greek mythology, and her name comes directly from the Greek word mnēmē, meaning remembrance or memory. That word did more work than most divine names ever have to. So why does a Titan, a category of god that…