Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter V: Primordial Gods & Titans
The Titans and the Titanomachy: Kronos, Rhea and the War
The Titans of Greek mythology: Kronos and Rhea, the children swallowed and Zeus saved, the ten-year Titanomachy against the Olympians and its aftermath.
The Titans were the second generation of Greek gods, the twelve children of Gaia (Earth) and Ouranos (Sky), who ruled the world under Kronos after he overthrew his father. Warned that a son would depose him in turn, Kronos swallowed each child that his sister-wife Rhea bore, until Rhea saved the infant Zeus by giving Kronos a stone to swallow instead. The grown Zeus freed his siblings, and in the Titanomachy, a ten-year war, the Olympian gods defeated the Titans and imprisoned them in Tartarus.
Who Were the Titans?§
According to Hesiod, Gaia and Ouranos had twelve Titan children: Oceanus, the river encircling the earth; Coeus; Crius; Hyperion, "he who goes above", father of the Sun; Iapetus; Theia; Rhea; Themis, divine law and right order; Mnemosyne, Memory; Phoebe; Tethys, wife of Oceanus; and Kronos, the youngest. How their reign began, with the castration of Ouranos, is told in the Greek creation myth.
Several Titans are little more than names, while others matter mainly through their children. Hyperion and Theia were parents of Helios, Selene and Eos (Sun, Moon and Dawn); Coeus and Phoebe of Leto and Asteria; Oceanus and Tethys of the rivers and the Oceanid nymphs. Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene had four sons who are often called Titans too: Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Themis and Mnemosyne were later among the consorts of Zeus, bearing him the Seasons and Fates and the nine Muses, so the older order was absorbed into the new as well as defeated.
The origin of the word Titan is unknown, and it may be pre-Greek. Hesiod's punning explanation connects it with "straining" and with "vengeance". The Titans also received some worship: Athens celebrated a harvest festival of Kronos, the Kronia, in midsummer, at which slaves were said to feast with their masters, and Pausanias reports sacrifices to Kronos on the Hill of Kronos at Olympia.
Kronos Swallows His Children§
Having seized his father's power, Kronos learned from Gaia and starry Ouranos that he was destined to be overcome by his own son. To prevent it he swallowed his children as soon as each came from Rhea's womb: first Hestia, then Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. Rhea grieved unceasingly, and when she was about to bear Zeus she begged her parents for a plan.
They sent her to Lyctus in Crete, where Gaia received the newborn and hid him in a cave. Rhea wrapped a great stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to Kronos, who took it in his hands and gulped it down, not knowing that his son remained alive. Later writers add details that Hesiod does not give. In Apollodorus's Library (probably first or second century CE), Zeus is born in a cave on Mount Dikte and nursed by the nymphs Adrasteia and Ida on the milk of the goat Amaltheia, while the armed Kouretes dance and clash their spears on their shields so that Kronos will not hear the baby cry. Other writers place the cave on Mount Ida, and Amaltheia is sometimes a nymph rather than a goat; her horn became the horn of plenty, the cornucopia.
When Zeus was grown, Kronos was made to vomit up his children. Hesiod attributes this to the counsels of Gaia; Apollodorus says that the Oceanid Metis gave Kronos a drug. The stone came up first, and Zeus set it up at Delphi as a sign and wonder for mortals. Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, saw a stone at Delphi that was anointed with oil every day and wrapped in raw wool at festivals, which local people identified as the stone given to Kronos. Because the siblings emerged in reverse order, Hestia could be called both the eldest and the youngest of the children of Kronos.
The Golden Age of Kronos§
Alongside the image of the cannibal father ran a very different memory. In Hesiod's Works and Days, the first race of mortals, the golden race, lived "in the time of Kronos" like gods, without toil or old age, while the earth bore fruit of its own accord. Pindar, in his Second Olympian Ode (476 BCE), places Kronos as ruler of the Isles of the Blessed, where the virtuous dead live in peace; a line in some manuscripts of the Works and Days says the same, though many editors regard it as a later addition.
The Romans identified Kronos with their god Saturn, whose winter festival, the Saturnalia, also turned social order upside down for a few days, and Latin poets such as Virgil made the "Saturnian age" a byword for lost innocence. Ancient allegorists, playing on the similarity of Kronos and chronos ("time"), read the father who devours his children as Time consuming everything it brings forth. That reading lies behind Peter Paul Rubens's Saturn (1636–38) and Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son (c. 1819–23), and behind the long tradition that linked Saturn with old age, melancholy and the slowest of the planets.
The Titanomachy: The War of Titans and Olympians§
The war for control of the cosmos is described in the Theogony, which is the only full early account to survive. A separate epic called the Titanomachy, attributed in antiquity to Eumelus of Corinth or to Arctinus of Miletus, is lost except for a few fragments.
The Titans fought from Mount Othrys in Thessaly, the children of Kronos from Mount Olympus, and for ten full years neither side could prevail. At Gaia's advice Zeus released the Hundred-Handers, Kottos, Briareos and Gyges, whom Ouranos had bound beneath the earth, restored their strength with nectar and ambrosia, and asked for their help. The Cyclopes, also freed by Zeus, had already given him thunder and the lightning bolt; Apollodorus adds that they made a helmet of invisibility for Hades and a trident for Poseidon.
Hesiod's battle scene is one of the most powerful passages in early Greek poetry. The boundless sea roars, the earth crashes, broad heaven groans and shakes, and Olympus trembles from its base. Zeus no longer holds back his strength: his bolts fly thick from heaven and earth, the forests burn, and the heat seizes Chaos itself. The Hundred-Handers hurl three hundred rocks in volleys and bury the Titans under a shadow of missiles, driving them beneath the earth. There the defeated gods are bound in Tartarus, as far below the earth as heaven is above it: a bronze anvil, Hesiod says, would fall nine days and nights from heaven to earth and nine more from earth to Tartarus. Poseidon fixed bronze gates on the prison, and the Hundred-Handers became its guards.
Not every Titan fought against Zeus. Styx, eldest daughter of Oceanus, came first to his side with her children Victory (Nike), Power (Kratos), Force (Bia) and Rivalry (Zelos), and Zeus rewarded her by making her the great oath of the gods. In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Prometheus and his mother Themis also helped Zeus, an alliance that makes the Titan's later punishment all the more bitter; their story is told in Prometheus and Pandora. Of the sons of Iapetus, Menoetius was struck down by lightning for his arrogance, and Atlas was condemned to hold up the broad sky at the ends of the earth near the Hesperides.
After the War: Kronos, the Giants and the New Order§
After the victory the gods urged Zeus to take the kingship, and he distributed honours and offices among them. Homer's Iliad gives a different account of the settlement: Zeus, Poseidon and Hades drew lots, receiving the sky, the sea and the misty underworld, while the earth and Olympus remained common to all. How Zeus then secured his reign, by swallowing Metis and fathering Athena, is told in Zeus, king of the gods.
The fate of Kronos varies. Homer places him and Iapetus in deepest Tartarus, where no sun or wind reaches them. Pindar and later writers imagine a reconciliation, with Kronos released to rule the Isles of the Blessed. An Orphic tradition reported by the Neoplatonist Porphyry has Zeus make Kronos drunk on honey and bind him while he sleeps, and in the Orphic theogonies the Titans also play a darker role, as the murderers of the child Dionysus (see Orphism and the Orphic gold tablets).
Zeus's rule faced further challenges. Gaia, angry at the treatment of her children, bore the monstrous Typhon to Tartarus, and later the Giants, born from the blood of Ouranos, rose against Olympus in the Gigantomachy, a war the gods could win only with the help of the mortal hero Heracles. Ancient authors and artists often blurred the Titanomachy and the Gigantomachy, but the latter, with its contrast between civilised gods and lawless earth-born brutes, became the favourite of sculptors, from the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi to the Great Altar of Pergamon.
Interpreting the War of the Gods§
The Titanomachy is the hinge of Greek sacred history. It ends the cycle of fathers overthrown by sons and establishes the stable rule under which the Greeks themselves lived. Hesiod presents the victory as the triumph not merely of force but of justice and intelligence: Zeus wins with allies whom he has freed and rewards fairly, and he keeps his throne by absorbing wisdom (Metis) rather than by swallowing his children.
Scholars have long noted that the Titans resemble older, more elemental powers, Ocean, Sun and Memory among them, while the Olympians are gods of the city, of crafts and of law. It is tempting to see the war as a memory of a historical clash of religions, but most historians now doubt such readings, emphasising instead the Near Eastern parallels in which a young storm god defeats an older generation, notably the Hittite Kumarbi cycle and the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Later poets turned the Titans into symbols of noble defeat and rebellion: John Keats's unfinished Hyperion (1818–19) shows the fallen Titans mourning their lost world, and the Romantic Prometheus became a hero of resistance to tyranny.
Frequently asked questions§
How many Titans were there?§
Hesiod lists twelve, six male and six female: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Kronos, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. Their children, such as Atlas, Prometheus, Helios and Leto, are often called Titans as well, so modern lists vary.
What is the difference between the Titans and the Giants?§
The Titans were the generation of gods before the Olympians, children of Gaia and Ouranos who ruled under Kronos. The Giants were a separate race born from the blood of Ouranos, who fought the Olympians in a later war, the Gigantomachy; ancient writers sometimes confused the two.
Why did Kronos eat his children?§
Gaia and Ouranos had prophesied that one of his sons would overthrow him, just as he had overthrown his own father. Swallowing each child at birth was his attempt to cheat that fate, and it failed when Rhea substituted a stone for the infant Zeus.
Were the Titans evil?§
Not in a simple sense. Greek myth treats them as an older, wilder order rather than as demons; some, like Themis, Mnemosyne, Styx and Prometheus, sided with or served Zeus, and the age of Kronos could be remembered as a lost golden age.
Sources and further reading§
- Theogony — Hesiod, c. 700 BCE
- Works and Days — Hesiod, c. 700 BCE
- Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica — Hugh G. Evelyn-White (trans.), 1914
- Apollodorus: The Library — James George Frazer (trans.), 1921
- Greek Epic Fragments from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC — M. L. West, 2003
- Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources — Timothy Gantz, 1993
- The Gods of the Greeks — Karl Kerényi, 1951
- Saturn and Melancholy — Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, 1964