Coeus

• 1. Introduction

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  Coeus, also called Koios or Polus, was one of the Titans, the children of Uranus, the Sky, and Gaia, the Earth. Among the old gods of Greek myth, he is one of the quietest. He takes no active part in the stories. He turns up in lists of Titans and almost nowhere else. So why does he still have a place in the mythology at all? What happened to him when the Titans lost their war? And how did a name on a list come to be tied to a real island?

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• 2. Daughters of the Shining One

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  Phoebe, whose name means "shining", was both the sister and the partner of Coeus. Together they had two daughters, Leto and Asteria. Their value in the myths lies almost entirely in what these women went on to produce.

  Leto joined with Zeus, the son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Their children were Artemis and Apollo, two of the best known of all the Greek gods.

  Asteria followed a different path. She became the mother of Hecate, whose father was Perses. Perses was the son of the Titan Crius and Crius's half-sister Eurybia.

  The father of Artemis and Apollo was Zeus, and Zeus was also the one who would break the Titans.

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• 3. Chains in Tartarus

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  The Titanomachy was the war in which Zeus and the other Olympians overthrew the Titans, and Coeus was among the losers. Zeus then sent Coeus and all his brothers except Oceanus to Tartarus, where they were imprisoned.

  Coeus did not stay quiet there. The account says he was overcome by madness, broke free of his bonds and tried to escape. Cerberus drove him back.

  The story does not end in chains. Zeus eventually freed the Titans, which presumably included Coeus, though the source treats this as likely rather than stated outright.

  A freed Coeus is not the only version of his afterlife. One Roman writer sets him in a very different place, on an island in the sea.

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• 4. The Island of Kos

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  Tacitus wrote that Coeus was the first person to live on the island of Kos. The islanders had their own reason to care. Kos claimed to be the birthplace of his daughter Leto.

  The link rests on a matter of spelling. The Greek name Κοῖος, written Koîos, was altered to Κῶιος, written Kōios. That small change in form brought his name close to the name of the island.

  It is a thin thread, yet it is the one thing that ties a Titan with no recorded deeds to a real stretch of coastline.

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