Titans

• 1. Introduction

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  The Titans, the gods who ruled Greek mythology before Zeus and his siblings, ended up behind gates of bronze. An old poem says it plainly: "They cannot get out, for Poseidon has set bronze gates upon it, and a wall is extended on both sides." The prison lies in a dank place at the farthest edge of the huge earth, hidden under murky gloom. That image is the one most listeners remember. It leaves a great many questions open. Who exactly were these gods, and how many of them were there? Did the poets even agree on who their parents were? Did every Titan share the fate of the prisoners behind the bronze? Where did the Greeks find a story about a defeated divine generation? And what did one strange tradition claim these fallen gods had to do with human beings?

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• 2. The Family Tree

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  Twelve is the number Hesiod gives, and he makes them the children of Uranus, the Sky, and Gaia, the Earth. The six brothers are Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus and Cronus. The six sisters, called Titanesses, are Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys.

  Four marriages in his account join brother to sister. Oceanus weds Tethys, Coeus weds Phoebe, Hyperion weds Theia and Cronus weds Rhea. Iapetus takes his niece Clymene, a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. Crius marries his half-sister Eurybia, whose parents were Gaia and Pontus. Themis and Mnemosyne both marry their nephew Zeus, a son of Cronus and Rhea.

  The children of these unions fill out the cosmos. Oceanus and Tethys produce three thousand river gods and three thousand Oceanids. Hyperion and Theia give the sky Helios the Sun, Selene the Moon and Eos the Dawn. Coeus and Phoebe have Leto and Asteria, while Crius and Eurybia have Astraeus, Pallas and Perses. Iapetus and Clymene have Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Cronus and Rhea produce Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus. By Zeus, Themis bears the three Horae, the Hours, and the three Moirai, the Fates. Mnemosyne bears the nine Muses.

  Most of these descendants are not counted as Titans. Leto, Helios, Atlas and Prometheus are the ones who sometimes receive the title. The river gods, Oceanids, Olympians, Horae, Moirai and Muses do not.

  Homer may have known a different tree. In the Iliad, in a passage called the Deception of Zeus, Hera speaks of "Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, and mother Tethys". Hypnos describes Oceanus as the one "from whom they all are sprung". That hints at a tradition where Oceanus and Tethys, not Uranus and Gaia, were the first parents.

  Plato's Timaeus offers what looks like a compromise, probably drawn from Orphic sources. Uranus and Gaia parent Oceanus and Tethys, who in turn parent Cronus and Rhea and "all that go with them", plus Phorcys. In his Cratylus, Plato quotes Orpheus saying that Oceanus and Tethys were "the first to marry".

  The mythographer Apollodorus counts thirteen Titans instead of twelve. His addition is Dione, the mother of Aphrodite by Zeus. Phorcys in Plato and Dione in Apollodorus suggest an Orphic list where those two stand in for Oceanus and Tethys.

  The Roman writer Hyginus produces a tangled list that mixes Titans with Hundred-Handers, a Cyclops and the three Furies. Pausanias adds one more oddity. He reports seeing an image of an armored man said to be the Titan Anytos, who raised the Arcadian goddess Despoina.

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• 3. Former Gods

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  Theoi proteroi, "the former gods", is the phrase Hesiod uses for the Titans. He also calls them earth-born, and the label fits how other poems treat them. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an angry Hera prays to the Titans "who dwell beneath the earth", as though they were spirits of the ground. In the Iliad she swears an oath by the river Styx. She "invoked by name all the gods below Tartarus, that are called Titans" to witness it. Set against the heavenly Olympians, they look like a counterweight from below.

  Scholars once took them for the gods of an indigenous people pushed aside by Greek invaders. That idea has been dropped. What the Titans supplied instead was a backstory. They explained where the Olympians came from and how those gods had won supremacy over the cosmos.

  Hesiod may have settled on twelve Titans to mirror the twelve Olympians. Some of his names may be poetic inventions made to reach the count. Apart from Cronus, the group takes no part in the overthrow of Uranus. We hear of them acting together only once, in their war with the Olympians. After that they have no role in ordinary Greek myth, and no part in Greek cult.

  Individually, they are thin figures. Homer names only two of them as Titans, Cronus and Iapetus. Several seem to exist purely as parents. Coeus and Phoebe matter because their daughter Leto bore Apollo and Artemis to Zeus. Crius is the father of three sons who in turn only father more important beings, namely the Anemoi, the Winds, Nike, Victory, and Hecate.

  The exception is Cronus, the youngest of the Titans, and he earns his place through an act of violence.

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• 4. The Succession War

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  Eighteen children is Hesiod's count for Uranus and Gaia. Twelve are Titans, three are Cyclopes, and three are the Hecatoncheires, the Hundred-Handers. Uranus hated the lot of them and hid them away inside Gaia. In pain and anger, she made a sickle of adamant and urged her children to punish their father. Only Cronus agreed. Gaia hid him in ambush, and when Uranus came to lie with her, Cronus castrated him. That act allowed the Titans to be born, and it left Cronus in command with the Titans beneath him.

  Uranus and Gaia then prophesied that one of Cronus's own children would overthrow him. So when he married Rhea, he swallowed each child she bore, in order: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. Rhea grieved. Pregnant with Zeus, she begged her parents for help, and they sent her to Lyctus on Crete. Gaia took the newborn and hid him deep in a cave beneath Mount Aigaion. Rhea handed Cronus a huge stone wrapped in baby's clothes, and he swallowed that instead.

  When Zeus had grown, he forced Cronus to disgorge the five children, using some trickery of Gaia that Hesiod does not describe. Zeus then freed his uncles the Cyclopes, who gave him the thunderbolt that Gaia had hidden. The war that followed is the Titanomachy, the battle of the Titans. The Titans fought from Mount Othrys and the Olympians from Mount Olympus. In the tenth year, following Gaia's advice, Zeus released the Hundred-Handers, and they turned the fight. Zeus hurled his thunderbolt, threw the Titans into Tartarus, and left the Hundred-Handers as their guards.

  Apollodorus tells the tale with differences. His Titans were born after the Cyclopes and Hundred-Handers, whom Uranus imprisoned while leaving the Titans free. Every Titan except Oceanus attacked Uranus. Afterward they freed the prisoners and made Cronus their sovereign, and he locked the prisoners up again in Tartarus. Zeus gets help from Metis, a daughter of Oceanus, who gives Cronus a potion that makes him bring up the swallowed children. Zeus kills a warder named Campe to free the Cyclopes. They give Poseidon his trident and Hades his helmet.

  Hyginus, writing in Roman terms, gives the war a domestic cause. Juno is furious at Jupiter over his son Epaphus by Io, one of his many lovers. She incites the Titans to rebel and restore Saturn, the Roman Cronus, to the kingship. Jupiter, helped by Minerva, Apollo and Diana, crushes the rebellion and sends the Titans down to Tartarus.

  Homer says little. In the Iliad, Iapetus and Cronos have no joy in the rays of Helios Hyperion, the Sun, nor in any breeze, for deep Tartarus surrounds them. Aeschylus gives the war a voice in Prometheus Bound. There Prometheus says he urged the Titans to win by guile rather than force. They ignored him, so he sided with Zeus. By his counsel, he says, Tartarus now hides Cronus and his allies. That choice, as other poets tell it, did not save him from Zeus's anger.

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• 5. Who Stayed Free

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  Iapetus is the only one of the original twelve whom the poets name as a fellow prisoner of Cronus in Tartarus. Beyond him the record is vague about who was locked away. Several Titans clearly were not. Oceanus, the great river that encircles the world, appears to have stayed out of the war altogether. In Hesiod he sends his daughter Styx to fight for Zeus, along with her children Zelus (Envy), Nike (Victory), Kratos (Power) and Bia (Force). In the Iliad, Hera says that Oceanus and his wife Tethys looked after her during the fighting. Prometheus Bound shows Oceanus free to visit his nephew Prometheus.

  Helios, the Titan son of Hyperion, also stays free and keeps driving his sun-chariot across the sky each day. The freedom of Oceanus and Helios, and perhaps Hyperion as a sun figure, looks like cosmic necessity. A river that circles the world and the Sun cannot sensibly be shut inside a prison.

  The sons of the Titans fare unevenly. Three sons of Iapetus, Atlas, Menoetius and Prometheus, are tied by ancient sources to the war. In the Theogony, Zeus punishes both Atlas and Menoetius, but Hesiod does not name the crime. Atlas is forced to hold up the sky on his shoulders. None of the early sources, Hesiod, Homer, Pindar or Aeschylus, says this followed the war. Hyginus does, claiming Atlas led the Titans in revolt. Menoetius is struck down by the thunderbolt and cast into Erebus "because of his mad presumption and exceeding pride". Only Apollodorus says this was for fighting in the war.

  Prometheus is not linked by Hesiod to the war at all. In the Theogony he stays free until he tricks Zeus at Mecone and steals fire. For that, Zeus chains him to a rock. An eagle comes every day to eat his "immortal liver", which grows back every night.

  The female Titans, when they appear at all, remain free. Themis, Mnemosyne and Leto all become wives of Zeus. Leto takes the Trojan side in the Iliad and is also caught up in the tale of the giant Tityos. Rhea stays active after the war. She appears at Leto's delivery of Apollo, carries Zeus's message to Demeter about the settlement over Persephone, and brings Pelops back to life.

  Some later poets doubted that the prison was permanent. In a poem from 462 BC, Pindar says that although Atlas still strains under the sky, "Zeus freed the Titans". In another poem, from 476 BC, he places Cronus on the Isles of the Blessed, where Greek heroes live in the afterlife. Souls who keep free of wrongdoing travel to "the tower of Cronus", where Rhadamanthys sits beside him. Aeschylus wrote a lost play, Prometheus Lyomenos, with a chorus of freed Titans. Two papyrus copies of Hesiod's Works and Days also have Zeus releasing Cronus. Most editors judge those lines to be later additions.

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• 6. Eastern Roots

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  Five hundred years before Hesiod, a Hurro-Hittite text called the Song of Kumarbi, or Kingship in Heaven, already told a story of strikingly similar shape. It describes a succession of kings in heaven: Anu, the Sky, then Kumarbi, then the storm-god Teshub. Like Cronus, Kumarbi castrates the sky-god and takes his kingship. Like Cronus, he swallows gods, and perhaps a stone. One of them is Teshub, who, like the storm-god Zeus, apparently wins a war among the gods.

  It is generally accepted that Greece imported this succession myth, and with it came the tale of a defeated older generation, which the Greeks identified as Titans. Other Hittite texts speak of "former gods", karuilies siunes, which matches Hesiod's theoi proteroi. Usually numbering twelve, they end up confined in the underworld by Teshub, behind gates they cannot open.

  The Hurrians called these gods the "gods of down under", enna durenna. The Hittites linked them with the Anunnaki, the Babylonian gods of the underworld. In the Babylonian poem Enûma Eliš, dated to the late second millennium BC or earlier, the storm-god Marduk defeats and imprisons the Anunnaki, much as Zeus does the Titans.

  Mesopotamia knew other groups of fallen gods as well, possibly tied to the Anunnaki. They include the Dead Gods, Dingiruggû, the Banished Gods, ilāni darsūti, and the Defeated, or Bound, Gods, ilāni kamûti.

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• 7. Dionysus and Humankind

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  Zagreus is the title often given to Dionysus in the Orphic story of the sparagmos, his dismemberment, which is often considered the central myth of Orphism. Scholars reconstruct it from scattered ancient sources. Zeus comes to Persephone as a serpent, and Dionysus is born. The child is taken to Mount Ida and guarded by the dancing Curetes, as the infant Zeus once was. Zeus means him to inherit rule of the cosmos, but a jealous Hera incites the Titans against him. In this telling they are apparently not imprisoned in Tartarus.

  The Titans whiten their faces with gypsum and lure the infant with toys, including a mirror. They seize him and tear him to pieces. The pieces are boiled, roasted and partly eaten. Athena manages to save his heart, and with it Zeus contrives Dionysus's rebirth from Semele.

  An account of human origins is often attached to this story. Zeus punishes the Titans with his thunderbolt, and humankind is born from their remains. People then inherit the guilt of the Titans' crime. By some accounts this formed the basis for an Orphic doctrine of the divinity of man. How far such a tradition really existed, and when, is still debated.

  Plutarch, the biographer and essayist of the 2nd century AD, links the dismemberment with the Titans' punishment. In his essay On the Eating of Flesh, he mentions their assaults on Dionysus and their blasting by thunderbolt after tasting his blood. He says nothing of human origins, Orpheus or Orphism. The Christian apologist Arnobius, in the early 4th century AD, and the epic poet Nonnus, in the 5th, say the murder is why Zeus imprisons the Titans in Tartarus.

  Only the Neoplatonist Olympiodorus, in the 6th century AD, explicitly joins the two stories. Reporting Orpheus, he writes that Zeus, "angered by the deed, blasts them with his thunderbolts, and from the sublimate of the vapors that rise from them comes the matter from which men are created." Since the Titans ate Dionysus, he concludes, we are partly Dionysus ourselves.

  Some 19th- and 20th-century scholars, among them Jane Ellen Harrison, have argued that an initiatory or shamanic ritual lies beneath the cannibal myth. Martin Litchfield West makes the same case for shamanistic initiation in early Greek religion. Harrison's attention to the white gypsum also shaped her theory about the Titans' name.

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• 8. Names and Stars

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  Hesiod offered his own explanation of the word Titanes, deriving it from titaino, meaning to strain, and tisis, meaning vengeance. In his telling, Uranus coined the name "in reproach, for he said that they strained and did presumptuously a fearful deed, and that vengeance for it would come afterwards". Modern scholars doubt this, and the true origin of the word remains uncertain.

  Harrison proposed a humbler source. She traced Titan to the Greek titanos, a word for white earth, clay or gypsum. On her reading, the Titans were "white clay men", figures covered in pale dust during ritual.

  The name has traveled far beyond Greece. The planet Saturn takes its name from the Roman equivalent of Cronus. Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is named for the Titans as a group. Several smaller moons carry individual names: Tethys, Phoebe, Rhea, Hyperion and Iapetus. The astronomer William Henry Pickering claimed to have found another moon, which he called Themis, but it was never confirmed. The name went instead to the asteroid 24 Themis, and asteroid 57 Mnemosyne is named for the Titaness of memory.

  One more Titan name has been borrowed by science. Theia is the label for a hypothesized proto-planet in the early solar system, thought to have collided with the young Earth and formed the Moon.

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