In Greek mythology, the Titans (; , ) were the deities who preceded the Olympians.Hansen, p. 302; Grimal, p. 457 s.v. Titans; Tripp, p. 579 s.v. Titans; Rose, p. 1079 s.v. Titan; Smith, s.v. Titan 1.. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, they were the twelve children of the primordial deities Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth). The six male Titans were Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus, and the six female Titans (called the Titanesses; ; , ) were Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys.
After Cronus married his sister Rhea, she bore the first generation of Olympians: the six siblings Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Hades, and Hestia. Certain other children of the Titans, including Prometheus, Atlas, Helios, and Leto, are sometimes also called Titans.
The Titans were the former deities, the generation of gods preceding the Olympians. They were overthrown as part of the Greek succession myth, which tells how Cronus seized power from his father Uranus and ruled the cosmos with his fellow Titans before in turn being defeated and replaced as the ruling pantheon of gods by Zeus and the Olympians in a ten-year war known as the Titanomachy ('battle of the Titans'). In the aftermath of this war, the vanquished Titans were banished from the upper world and held imprisoned under guard in Tartarus. Some Titans, such as Oceanus and Helios, were allowed to remain free.
Genealogy
Hesiod's genealogy According to Hesiod, the children of Uranus and Gaia were Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Cronus.Hesiod, Theogony 133–138. Among eight of the twelve Titans there were four marriages between brothers and sisters: Oceanus and Tethys, Coeus and Phoebe, Hyperion and Theia, and Cronus and Rhea. The other two Titans, Iapetus and Crius, married with familiars who were not their sisters. Iapetus married his niece Clymene, the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, while Crius married his half-sister Eurybia, the daughter of Gaia and Pontus. The other two Titanesses, Themis and Mnemosyne, married with their nephew Zeus, the son of Cronus and Rhea.
From Oceanus and Tethys came the three thousand river gods, and three thousand Oceanids.Hesiod, Theogony 337–370. From Coeus and Phoebe came Leto, another wife of Zeus, and Asteria.Hesiod, Theogony 404–409. From Crius and Eurybia came Astraeus, Pallas, and Perses.Hesiod, Theogony 375–377. From Hyperion and Theia came the celestial personifications Helios (Sun), Selene (Moon), and Eos (Dawn).Hesiod, Theogony 371–374. From Iapetus and Clymene came Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus, and Epimetheus.Hesiod, Theogony 507–511. From Cronus and Rhea came the Olympians: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus.Hesiod, Theogony 453–458. By Zeus, Themis bore the three Horae (Hours), and the three Moirai (Fates),Hesiod, Theogony 901–906, although at Theogony 217 the Moirai are said to be the daughters of Nyx (Night). and Mnemosyne bore the nine Muses.Hesiod, Theogony 915–920.
While the descendants of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys, Cronus and Rhea, Themis, and Mnemosyne (i.e. the river gods, the Oceanids, the Olympians, the Horae, the Moirai, and the Muses) are not normally considered to be Titans, descendants of the other Titans, notably: Leto, Helios, Atlas, and Prometheus, are themselves sometimes referred to as Titans.Parada, p. 179 s.v. TITANS; Smith, s.v. Titan 2.; Rose, p. 143 s.v. Atlas, p. 597 s.v. Leto, p. 883 s.v. Prometheus; Tripp, p. 120 s.v. Atlas, p. 266 s.v. Helius, p. 499 s.v. Prometheus.
Variations
Passages in a section of the Iliad called the Deception of Zeus suggest the possibility that Homer knew of a tradition in which Oceanus and Tethys (rather than Uranus and Gaia, as in Hesiod) were the parents of the Titans.Fowler 2013, pp. 8, 11; Hard, pp. 36–37, p. 40; West 1997, p. 147; Gantz, p. 11; Burkert 1995, pp. 91–92; West 1983, pp. 119–120. According to Epimenides (see Fowler 2013, pp. 7–8), the first two beings, Night and Aer, produced Tartarus, who in turn produced two Titans (possibly Oceanus and Tethys) from whom came the world egg. Twice Homer has Hera describe the pair as "Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, and mother Tethys", while in the same passage Hypnos describes Oceanus as "from whom they all are sprung".Homer, Iliad 14.201, 302 [= 201], 245. According to West 1997, p. 147, these lines suggests a myth in which Oceanus and Tethys are the "first parents of the whole race of gods." And, although Gantz, p. 11, points out that, "mother" may simply refer to the fact that Tethys was Hera's foster mother for a time, as Hera tells us in the lines immediately following, while the reference to Oceanus as "the genesis of gods" might be a "formulaic epithet" referring to the innumerable rivers and springs who were the sons of Oceanus (compare with Iliad 21.195–197), Hypnos' description of Oceanus as "genesis for all" is hard to understand as meaning other than that, for Homer, Oceanus was the father of the Titans.
Plato, in his Timaeus, provides a genealogy (probably Orphic) which perhaps reflected an attempt to reconcile this apparent divergence between Homer and Hesiod, with Uranus and Gaia as the parents of Oceanus and Tethys, and Oceanus and Tethys as the parents of Cronus and Rhea "and all that go with them", plus Phorcys.Gantz, pp. 11–12, 743; West 1983, pp. 117–118; Fowler 2013, p. 11; Plato, Timaeus 40d–e. In his Cratylus, Plato quotes Orpheus as saying that Oceanus and Tethys were "the first to marry", possibly also reflecting an Orphic theogony in which Oceanus and Tethys, rather than Uranus and Gaia, were the primeval parents.West 1983, pp. 118–120; Fowler 2013, p. 11; Plato, Cratylus 402b [= Orphic fr. 15 Kern]. To Hesiod's twelve Titans, the mythographer Apollodorus, adds a thirteenth Titan, Dione, the mother of Aphrodite by Zeus.Apollodorus, 1.1.3, 1.3.1. Dione is also the mother of Aphrodite by Zeus in the Iliad, 5.370, 3.374; but in the Theogony, 191–200, Aphrodite was born from the foam which formed around Uranus' severed genitals when Cronus threw them into the sea. Plato's inclusion of Phorkys, apparently, as a Titan, and the mythographer Apollodorus's inclusion of Dione, suggests an Orphic tradition in which the canonical twelve Titans consisted of Hesiod's twelve with Phorkys and Dione taking the place of Oceanus and Tethys.Gantz, p. 743.
The Roman mythographer Hyginus, in his somewhat confused genealogy,Bremmer, p. 5, calls Hyginus' genealogy "a strange hodgepodge of Greek and Roman cosmogonies and early genealogies". after listing as offspring of Aether (Upper Sky) and Earth (Gaia), Ocean [Oceanus], Themis, Tartarus, and Pontus, next lists "the Titans", followed by two of Hesiod's Hundred-Handers: Briareus and Gyges, one of Hesiod's three Cyclopes: Steropes, then continues his list with Atlas, Hyperion and Polus, Saturn [Cronus], Ops [Rhea], Moneta, Dione, and the three Furies: Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone.Hyginus, Fabulae Theogony 3. The geographer Pausanias mentions seeing the image of a man in armor, who was supposed to be the Titan Anytos, who was said to have raised the Arcadian goddess Despoina and had partaken in the dismemberment of Dionysus (Zagreus).
Former gods The Titans, as a group, represent a pre-Olympian order.Hansen, p. 302: "As a group the Titans are the older gods, the former gods, in contrast to the Oympians, who are the younger and present gods". Hesiod uses the expression "the former gods" () in reference to the Titans.West 2007, p. 162; Hard, p. 35; West 1997, pp. 111, 298; Hesiod, Theogony 424, 486. As noted by Woodard, p. 154 n. 44, Theogony 486: Οὐρανίδῃ μέγ’ ἄνακτι, θεῶν προτέρων βασιλῆι, which some interpret as meaning Cronus "former king of the gods" (e.g. Evelyn-White), others interpret as meaning Cronus "king of the former gods" (e.g. Most, pp. 40, 41; Caldwell, p. 56; West 1988, p. 17), for an argument against "former king" see West 1966, p. 301 on line 486 θεῶν προτέρων. They were the banished gods, who were no longer part of the upper world.Hard, p. 35: "The essential point is that the Titans [are] the former ruling gods who were banished from the upper world when the present devine order was established."; West 1983, p. 164: "The Titans are by definition the banished gods, the gods who have gone out of the world"; West 1966, p. 200 on line 133. Rather they were the gods who dwelt underground in Tartarus,Gantz, pp. 45–46; West 1966, p. 200 on line 133; Hesiod, Theogony 729 ff., 807–814; Homer, Iliad 8.478–481, 14.274, 14.278–279; 15.225; Aeschylus (?), Prometheus Bound 221. and as such, they may have been thought of as "gods of the underworld", who were the antithesis of, and in opposition to, the Olympians, the gods of the heavens.Woodard, pp. 96–97; West 1966, p. 201. Hesiod called the Titans "earth-born" (chthonic),Woodard, p. 97; Hesiod, Theogony 697. and in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Hera prays to the Titans "who dwell beneath the earth", calling on them to aid her against Zeus, just as if they were chthonic spirits.Gantz, p. 46; Homeric Hymn to Apollo (3) 334–339. In a similar fashion, in the Iliad, Hera, upon swearing an oath by the underworld river Styx, "invoked by name all the gods below Tartarus, that are called Titans" as witnesses.Athanassakis and Wolkow, p. 140; Burkert 1985, p. 200, which gives the Titans as an example of "chthonic gods"; Homer, Iliad 14.270–279.
They were not, as was once thought, the gods of an indigenous group in Greece, historically displaced by the new gods of Greek invaders. Rather, they were a group of gods whose mythology seems to have been borrowed from the Near East (see "Near East origins," below).Woodard, p. 92; Hard, pp. 34–35; Burkert 1995, p. 94; Caldwell, p. 36 on lines 133-137; West 1966, p. 200. These imported gods gave context and provided a backstory for the Olympian gods, explaining where these Greek Olympian gods had come from, and how they had come to occupy their position of supremacy in the cosmos. The Titans were the previous generation, and family of gods, whom the Olympians had to overthrow, and banish from the upper world, in order to become the ruling pantheon of Greek gods.
For Hesiod, possibly in order to match the twelve Olympian gods, there were twelve Titans: six males and six females, with some of Hesiod's names perhaps being mere poetic inventions, so as to arrive at the right number.West 1966 p. 36, which, concerning Hesiod's list of names, says: "Its very heterogeneity betrays its lack of traditional foundation. Rhea, Zeus' mother, must be married to Kronos, Zeus' father. Hyperion, as father of Helios, must be put back to that generation; so must ancient and venerable personages as Oceanus and Tethys, Themis and Mnemosyne. By the addition of four more colourless names (Koios, Kreios, Theia, and Phoibe), the list is made up to a complement of six males and six females";cf. West 1966, p. 200 on line 133. In Hesiod's Theogony, apart from Cronus, the Titans play no part at all in the overthrow of Uranus, and we only hear of their collective action in the Titanomachy, their war with the Olympians.Hard, p. 34. As a group, they have no further role in conventional Greek myth, nor do they play any part in Greek cult.Hard, p. 35; West 1966 pp. 200–201 on line 133.