Crius- Greek TitanTitan"Pillar of the South"

The Southern Pillar

Crius was one of the twelve elder Titans, born from Gaia and Uranus at the beginning of the cosmos. His name shares a root with κριός, the ram. Hesiod lists him among the sons of Earth and Sky, and ancient tradition identifies him as the Titan who held the southern pillar of the cosmos — one of four brothers, alongside Hyperion, Coeus, and Iapetus, who separated heaven and earth at the cardinal points.

When Gaia conspired against Uranus for imprisoning her monstrous children in the earth, it was these four who positioned themselves at the corners of the world. When Uranus descended to lie with Gaia, they seized him. Crius braced the south while Kronos, armed with an adamantine sickle, castrated their father. Together they wrenched heaven apart from earth, and from the blood that fell sprang the Erinyes and the Giants.

His domain encompassed the constellations and the ordering of the heavens. With his wife Eurybia, daughter of Pontus and Gaia, Crius fathered three sons. Through Astraeus came the Winds and the Stars; through Perses, Hecate. Pallas married the Oceanid Styx and fathered Nike and Kratos — both of whom fought for Zeus in the war that destroyed their grandfather.

From Pillar to Prison

When the ten-year war between Titans and Olympians came, the elder gods held Mount Othrys while the Olympians fought from Mount Olympus. Crius stood with his brothers — unlike Oceanus and certain female Titans who remained neutral. But Zeus freed the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires from the depths of the earth, and with thunderbolts and hundred-handed fury, the Titans were overthrown. Zeus cast the defeated into Tartarus, the abyss beneath the earth, guarded by the same Hekatonkheires they had failed to keep imprisoned. The Titan who had held heaven in place was locked far below it, denied even the sight of his constellations.