Titans- Greek GroupCollective"Elder Gods"

Children of Earth and Sky

Gaia and Uranus, Earth and Sky, produced twelve Titans: six sons and six daughters. They were the first generation of gods. But Gaia also bore the Cyclopes, who each had a single eye in the center of their foreheads, and the Hecatoncheires, who had a hundred hands and fifty heads apiece. Uranus looked at these children with horror. He forced them back into Gaia's body, deep in the earth, and refused to let them see the light.

Gaia groaned under the weight. She fashioned a great sickle of grey adamant and called for a champion among the Titans. Only one answered.

The Overthrow of Uranus

Most of the Titans were afraid. Kronos, the youngest, volunteered. Gaia set him in ambush.

When Uranus descended at nightfall to lie with the Earth, Kronos reached out from his hiding place and seized his father. With the sickle he cut away Uranus's genitals and flung them into the sea. Blood spattered the earth, and from it sprang the Erinyes, the avenging spirits, and the Giants. The severed flesh drifted on the waves, and white foam gathered around it. From that foam, Aphrodite was born.

Uranus retreated from the earth and never returned. But he cursed his sons as he withdrew, calling them Titanoi, "the straining ones," and prophesied that vengeance would come for what they had done.

The Reign of Kronos

With Uranus overthrown, Kronos took sovereignty. In Hesiod's Works and Days, his reign was a Golden Age: mortals lived like gods, free of toil and sorrow, feasting on the fruits of the earth without labor. The ground bore grain on its own. Men grew old without pain, and when death came it arrived like sleep. Yet Kronos did not free the Cyclopes and Hecatoncheires from Tartarus. He repeated his father's crime.

Kronos took his sister Rhea as queen. She bore him children, and Kronos swallowed each one at birth. A prophecy from Gaia and Uranus had warned that his own son would overthrow him, just as he had overthrown his father. Rhea endured the horror five times. Before the sixth birth, she fled to Crete on Gaia's advice and bore Zeus in a cave on Mount Dicte. She gave the infant to the Kouretes, armored warriors who clashed their shields and stamped their feet around the cave's entrance. The noise drowned out the baby's cries. Rhea wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and brought it to Kronos. He swallowed it whole.

Zeus grew up hidden on Crete, nursed on the milk of the goat Amalthea and fed on honey by the mountain nymphs.

The Titanomachy

When Zeus reached maturity, he returned to challenge his father. With help from the goddess Metis, who provided an emetic, he forced Kronos to vomit up the children he had swallowed. All emerged fully grown and ready for war. The stone came first.

The war between Titans and Olympians raged for ten years. The Titans held Mount Othrys; the Olympians fought from Mount Olympus. Neither side could break the other. Then Zeus, on Gaia's counsel, descended into Tartarus and freed the Cyclopes and Hecatoncheires. The Cyclopes forged the thunderbolt for Zeus and the trident for Poseidon. The Hecatoncheires took their positions behind the Olympian line.

Hesiod describes what followed. The earth burned. The forests caught fire from rim to rim. The sea boiled. Heat from the thunderbolts and the hundred-armed volleys reached Chaos itself, and the crash was as though the earth had collapsed onto the sky. Zeus threw bolt after bolt from the heights of Olympus. The Hecatoncheires hurled three hundred stones with every volley. The Titan line broke.

Not all Titans had fought. Oceanus withdrew to the world's edge. Prometheus foresaw which side would win and joined the Olympians.

Tartarus

The defeated Titans were cast into Tartarus, the deepest pit beneath the underworld, as far below Hades as the earth is below the sky. A bronze anvil dropped from heaven would fall nine days before striking the earth; dropped from the earth, it would fall nine more before reaching Tartarus. Hesiod describes it as a place of howling winds and impenetrable darkness, surrounded by triple walls of night, where even the gods feel dread. The Hecatoncheires stood as eternal guards behind bronze gates.

Atlas, son of Iapetus, received a punishment apart. He was condemned to stand at the western edge of the world and bear the weight of the sky upon his shoulders forever.

The stone Kronos had swallowed instead of Zeus was set at Delphi, at the foot of Parnassus. It became the Omphalos, the navel-stone of the world, anointed with oil.

In Pindar's second Olympian, Kronos is released at last and made ruler of the Isles of the Blessed, where the heroes of the Greek world spend their afterlife. The tyrant who devoured his children presides over paradise. Plutarch preserves the same tradition.