Titans
In Greek mythology, the Titans were the deities that preceded the Olympians. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, they were the twelve children of the primordial deities Uranus and Gaia. The six male Titans were Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Cronus, and the six female Titans 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, such as 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 being in turn defeated and replaced as the ruling pantheon of gods by Zeus and the Olympians in a ten-year war called the Titanomachy. As a result of this war, the vanquished Titans were banished from the upper world and held imprisoned under guard in Tartarus. Some Titans were apparently 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. 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. From Coeus and Phoebe came Leto, another wife of Zeus, and Asteria. From Crius and Eurybia came Astraeus, Pallas, and Perses. From Hyperion and Theia came the celestial personifications Helios, Selene, and Eos. From Iapetus and Clymene came Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus, and Epimetheus. From Cronus and Rhea came the Olympians: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. By Zeus, Themis bore the three Horae, and the three Moirai, and Mnemosyne bore the nine Muses.
While the descendants of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys, Cronus and Rhea, Themis, and Mnemosyne 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.
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 were the parents of the Titans. 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".Plato, in his Timaeus, provides a genealogy 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. 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. To Hesiod's twelve Titans, the mythographer Apollodorus, adds a thirteenth Titan, Dione, the mother of Aphrodite by Zeus. 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.
The Roman mythographer Hyginus, in his somewhat confused genealogy, after listing as offspring of Aether and Earth, Ocean , 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 , Ops , Moneta, Dione, and the three Furies: Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. 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.
Former gods
The Titans, as a group, represent a pre-Olympian order. Hesiod uses the expression "the former gods" in reference to the Titans. They were the banished gods, who were no longer part of the upper world. Rather they were the gods who dwelt underground in Tartarus, 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. Hesiod called the Titans "earth-born", 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. 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.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. 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. 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. As a group, they have no further role in conventional Greek myth, nor do they play any part in Greek cult.
As individuals, few of the Titans have any separate identity. Aside from Cronus, the only other figure Homer mentions by name as being a Titan is Iapetus. Some Titans seem only to serve a genealogical function, providing parents for more important offspring: Coeus and Phoebe as the parents of Leto, the mother, by Zeus, of the Olympians Apollo and Artemis; Hyperion and Theia as the parents of Helios, Selene and Eos; Iapetus as the father of Atlas and Prometheus; and Crius as the father of three sons Astraeus, Pallas, and Perses, who themselves seem only to exist to provide fathers for more important figures such as the Anemoi, Nike, and Hecate.
Overthrown
The Titans play a key role in an important part of Greek mythology, the succession myth. It told how the Titan Cronus, the youngest of the Titans, overthrew Uranus, and how in turn Zeus, by waging and winning a great ten-year war pitting the new gods against the old gods, called the Titanomachy, overthrew Cronus and his fellow Titans, and was eventually established as the final and permanent ruler of the cosmos.Hesiod
According to the standard version of the succession myth, given in Hesiod's Theogony, Uranus initially produced eighteen children with Gaia: the twelve Titans, the three Cyclopes, and the three Hecatoncheires, but hating them, he hid them away somewhere inside Gaia. Angry and in distress, Gaia fashioned a sickle made of adamant and urged her children to punish their father. Only her son Cronus was willing. So Gaia hid Cronus in "ambush", gave him an adamantine sickle, and when Uranus came to lie with Gaia, Cronus reached out and castrated his father. This enabled the Titans to be born and Cronus to assume supreme command of the cosmos, with the Titans as his subordinates.Cronus, having now taken over control of the cosmos from Uranus, wanted to ensure that he maintained control. Uranus and Gaia had prophesied to Cronus that one of Cronus' own children would overthrow him, so when Cronus married Rhea, he made sure to swallow each of the children she birthed. This he did with the first five: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, to Rhea's great sorrow. However, when Rhea was pregnant with Zeus, Rhea begged her parents Gaia and Uranus to help her save Zeus. So they sent Rhea to Lyctus on Crete to bear Zeus, and Gaia took the newborn Zeus to raise, hiding him deep in a cave beneath Mount Aigaion. Meanwhile, Rhea gave Cronus a huge stone wrapped in baby's clothes which he swallowed thinking that it was another of Rhea's children.
Zeus, now grown, forced Cronus to disgorge his other five children. Zeus then released his uncles the Cyclopes who then provide Zeus with his great weapon, the thunderbolt, which had been hidden by Gaia. A great war was begun, the Titanomachy, for control of the cosmos. The Titans fought from Mount Othrys, while the Olympians fought from Mount Olympus. In the tenth year of that great war, following Gaia's counsel, Zeus released the Hundred-Handers, who joined the war against the Titans, helping Zeus to gain the upper hand. Zeus cast the fury of his thunderbolt at the Titans, defeating them and throwing them into Tartarus, with the Hundred-Handers as their guards.