TITANI (Τιτάνες). — From the union of Uranus and Gea were born the T., gigantic beings endowed with prodigious strength.
The Theogony names 12 of them (v. 133), among the best known being: Hyperion, Rhea, Iapetus (the father of Prometheus and Atlas), Kronos, Atlas, Astraeus, and others. To these must be added two distinct groups of giants, the Cyclopes: Brontes, Steropes, and Arges; and the Hundred-Handers: Briareus, Cottus, and Gyges. Poetically, recalling the vengeance they took upon their father, the Theogony connects the name of the T. with the root τιταίνων. Diodorus, on the other hand, connects it with Τιταία, an ancient name for the Earth (Hist., III, 57; V, 66). Alternatively, taking as its point of departure a conception that saw in the T. the gods of light (Empedocles uses Τιτάν to designate Ἰαβήρ [38, Diels], while Nonnus of Panopolis, at a much later period, calls the sun Ἥλιος Τιτήν [Dion. 19, 206]), an attempt has been made to identify in the Proto-Indo-Germanic word « titan » the Indo-Germanic synonym « deivo » = « god », just as in « dijeus-div » there is the Latin « dies ». Accordingly, under this appellation the pre-Olympian gods as a whole would have been designated (v. A. Nehring, in Glotta, 14 [1924], pp. 167 ff; P. Kretschmer, ibid., pp. 309 ff). Subsequently the T. came into conflict with Zeus, who, aided by the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers—the latter having been freed from captivity—after a furious battle lasting ten years (Th., 635 ff.) and shaking all the elements, succeeded in overcoming these monstrous beings and hurling them back into Tartarus. While the Homeric poems contain only vague references (Iliad, I, 399; VIII, 477; Odyssey, VII, 59), in the Hesiodic Theogony these struggles against Zeus assume a prominent place in the so-called Titanomachy (629 ff.), which some regard as later or as an independent work (v. A. Koechly, De diversis Hesiodae theogoniae partibus, Turici 1860). The battle of Zeus against the T. symbolizes the triumph that the Olympian religion achieved over the ancient gods and seems almost to preserve the reflection, disguised in poetic images, of the remote and profound convulsions of the earth.