Atlas (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

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  Atlas is a Titan of Greek mythology, and his name is printed on the spines of books in homes and libraries everywhere. Yet the myths describe him doing one thing for all eternity: carrying a burden that never lifted. What was it? Why was it his to carry? And what happened when two of the greatest Greek heroes, Heracles and Perseus, crossed his path? This documentary follows a punished Titan as he turns into a petrified shepherd, a learned king, and the patron of map collections, and it asks how one name could stretch so far.

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• 2. The Titan's Sentence

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  Two brothers, Atlas and Menoetius, chose the losing side in the Titanomachy, the war between the Titans and the Olympians. Their father was the Titan Iapetus. Their mother was an Oceanid, called Asia in some sources and Clymene in others. Epimetheus and Prometheus were their brothers too.

  When the Titans fell, many of them were confined to Tartarus, and Menoetius was among them. Zeus chose a different punishment for Atlas. He was ordered to stand at the western edge of the earth and hold up the sky on his shoulders.

  That sentence gave him the epithet Atlas Telamon, which means "enduring Atlas." It also made him a doublet of Coeus, a figure who embodied the celestial axis, the line around which the heavens revolve.

  Later artists had a very specific idea of what rested on those shoulders, and it was not the earth.

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• 3. What He Carried

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  The marble globe carried by the Farnese Atlas is solid, and that solidity may explain one of the most common mistakes about him. Many people today believe Atlas was forced to hold up the Earth. Classical art shows something else. It shows him bearing the celestial spheres, the sky itself, and never the terrestrial globe.

  The confusion got a second push in the 16th century. Writers began using the word atlas for a body of terrestrial maps, and the Titan's burden slid from the heavens to the planet.

  The earliest Greek vase paintings and sculptures tell a harsher story. Michael J. Anderson explains that they show Atlas with a rigid stance, which stands for the weight of Zeus's everlasting punishment. A muscular body bent under a celestial globe or vault expressed a Greek idea of suffering that follows arrogance and rebellion. Such images treat the Titans as symbols of divine punishment and cosmic order.

  The modern misreading has found its own uses. Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, leans on the popular picture of a man holding the whole world on his back. She calls the capitalist and intellectual class "modern Atlases" who carry the modern world at great expense to themselves. Psychology borrows him too, as a metaphor for a person whose childhood was marked by excessive responsibilities.

  Yet the old myths also cast him in a far humbler role, as a shepherd who met the wrong stranger.

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• 4. Stone and Mountain

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  Around 398 BC, the Greek poet Polyidus told of Atlas as a shepherd who met the hero Perseus and was turned to stone. Ovid, writing later, gave a much fuller account and combined it with the myth of Heracles. In his version Atlas is both a shepherd and a king of Mauretania.

  Ovid has Perseus arrive in Atlas's kingdom and ask for shelter. Perseus declares that he is a son of Zeus. That claim frightens Atlas, because a prophecy had warned him that a son of Zeus would steal the golden apples from his orchard. He refuses the stranger any hospitality.

  Perseus answers by changing Atlas into stone, and not only into a single statue. The whole king becomes a mountain range. His head is the peak, his shoulders are the ridges, and his hair is the woods.

  The prophecy had been misunderstood all along. It did not concern Perseus. It concerned Heracles, another son of Zeus and the great-grandson of Perseus.

  When Heracles finally reached Atlas, the meeting turned on a bargain rather than a curse.

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• 5. The Golden Apples

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  Fetching golden apples from Hera's garden was one of the Twelve Labours of Heracles. The trees were tended by the Hesperides, who were also called the Atlantides and were reputed to be daughters of Atlas. The dragon Ladon guarded them. Heracles went to Atlas with an offer: he would hold up the heavens while the Titan collected the apples from his daughters.

  Atlas came back with the fruit and a plan. He proposed to deliver the apples himself, leaving Heracles under the sky. His reasoning was that anyone who took on the burden willingly had to carry it forever, or until someone else took it away.

  Heracles suspected that Atlas never meant to return, so he pretended to agree. He asked only that Atlas take the sky back for a few minutes, so that he could fold his cloak into padding for his shoulders. Atlas put down the apples and lifted the heavens again. Heracles picked up the apples and ran.

  Some versions end differently. In them, Heracles built the two great Pillars of Hercules to hold the sky away from the earth. That freed Atlas, much as Heracles had earlier freed Prometheus.

  The scene even crossed the sea to Italy. Two Etruscan bronze items from the 5th century BC, a mirror from Vulci and a ring from an unknown site, show Atlas meeting Hercle, the Etruscan form of Heracles. Both carry the name Aril for the Titan. This is a rare case where a Greek figure was imported but the name was not.

  The Etruscans were not the only people to give Atlas a new home, and the most lasting one lay in Africa.

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• 6. King of the West

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  Hesiod's Theogony placed the Hesperides and the Gorgons beyond Ocean, in the extreme west of the world. Atlas had long been linked with the Hesperides, so he drifted toward that same horizon. In time he became a legendary king of Mauretania, the land of the Mauri. It roughly matches modern Morocco and Algeria, and it should not be confused with the modern country of Mauritania.

  Several ancient writers helped pin down the location. Diodorus and Palaephatus say the Gorgons lived in the Gorgades, islands in the Aethiopian Sea. The main island was called Cerna. Some modern arguments identify these islands with Cape Verde, because of Phoenician exploration.

  Ovid supplies another thread. After Perseus turns Atlas into a mountain range, the hero flies over Aethiopia. The blood from Medusa's head falls and gives rise to the snakes of Libya.

  By the time of the Roman Empire, the habit of tying Atlas's home to the Atlas Mountains was firmly entrenched. Those mountains stand near Mauretania and Numidia.

  A king in that country needed a character to match. Atlas was said to be skilled in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. Antiquity credited him with inventing the first celestial sphere, and some texts go further and credit him with inventing astronomy itself.

  A scholar-king of this kind would later catch the eye of a Flemish mapmaker.

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• 7. A Crowded Family Tree

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  Hyginus, in his Fabulae, adds an older Atlas who was the son of Aether and Gaia. He is not the only rival. Eusebius and Diodorus describe an Atlas whose father was Uranus and whose mother was Gaia. His grandfather was Elium, called King of Phoenicia, who lived in Byblos with his wife Beruth. This Atlas was raised by his sister Basilia.

  The Titan's children are just as tangled. Sources call him the father of many children, mostly daughters, by different goddesses. With Hesperis he had the Hesperides. With Pleione, or in some sources Aethra, he had the Hyades, a son named Hyas, and the Pleiades.

  Other daughters have unspecified mothers. They include Dione, Maera, and the nymph Calypso, who lived on the island of Ogygia. Some of these figures are given conflicting or overlapping identities and parentage depending on the source.

  Plato added one more Atlas. In his account the first king of Atlantis bore the same name, but he was a son of Poseidon and a mortal woman, Cleito. That island, and an ocean, owe their names to wordplay and origins that scholars still argue about.

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• 8. A Name and Its Legacy

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  The Atlantic Ocean is derived from the Sea of Atlas. The island of Atlantis in Plato's Timaeus comes from the Greek phrase Atlantis nesos, which literally means Atlantean Island.

  The origin of the name itself is uncertain. Virgil paired Greek names with adjectives that explained them, and for Atlas he chose durus, meaning hard or enduring. George Doig takes this as a sign that Virgil knew the Greek verb tlenai, meaning to endure. Doig also raises the possibility that Virgil knew Strabo's remark that the native North African name for the mountain was Douris.

  Since the Atlas Mountains rise in Berber territory, others suggest a Berber source, the word adrar, meaning mountain. Historical linguists traditionally build the name from the Greek prefix a- and the Proto-Indo-European root telh2, meaning to uphold or support. Robert S. P. Beekes objects. He argues that an ancient Titan should not be expected to carry an Indo-European name, and he proposes a Pre-Greek origin, since such words often end in -ant.

  The cartographic legacy came in two steps. In 1572 the print-seller Antonio Lafreri put an engraved Titan on the titlepage of his assembled map volumes, Tavole Moderne di Geografia de la Maggior parte del Mondo di Diversi Autori. He did not use the word Atlas in the title.

  That innovation belonged to Gerardus Mercator, who called his work Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati. It appeared across the years 1585-1595. Mercator used the word as a dedication to honor the Titan in his role as King of Mauretania, a learned philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. He regarded Atlas as the founder of geography.

  Every bound collection of maps that has borrowed the word since carries that dedication to a mountain-sized king of the west.

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