Iapetus- Greek TitanTitan"The Piercer"

Origin

Iapetus was one of the twelve Titans, children of Uranus and Gaia who ruled the cosmos before the Olympians. In some traditions, four Titan brothers held the corners of the cosmos, keeping heaven and earth apart — Hyperion in the east, Coeus in the north, Crius in the south, and Iapetus in the west. When Gaia urged her children to ambush their father, the four brothers seized the sky god and held him at the world's four corners while Kronos castrated him with a sickle of adamant. Iapetus's station in the west would later pass to his son Atlas after the Titans' defeat.

Sons and Legacy

By the Oceanid Clymene (or Asia in some accounts), Iapetus fathered four sons: Prometheus, Atlas, Epimetheus, and Menoetius. Through Prometheus, who fashioned humans from clay and gave them fire, Iapetus was the ancestor of the human race. Through Prometheus's son Deucalion, who survived the great flood by building an ark, all subsequent mortals traced back to Iapetus's line. In Aristophanes, to call someone "Iapetus" was to call them as old as the world itself — a comic insult leveled at anyone hopelessly behind the times.

The Titanomachy and Imprisonment

When Zeus led the Olympians against the Titans, Iapetus fought alongside his brother Kronos. The war shook the cosmos for ten years as the Titans hurled mountains and the Olympians answered with thunderbolts. When the Titans fell, Zeus cast Iapetus and his brothers into Tartarus, the pit beneath the underworld — so deep, Hesiod says, that a bronze anvil dropped from heaven would fall nine days and nights before striking its floor. There they were sealed behind bronze gates with the Hundred-Handed Ones standing guard. Homer places Iapetus alongside Kronos in that abyss, sitting together where neither sun nor wind reaches.