Titans (Τιτᾶνες)

TITANS (Τιτᾶνες). - From the union of Uranus and Gaea were born the Titans, gigantic beings endowed with prodigious strength.

The Theogony names 12 of them (v. 133), and among the best known: Hyperion, Rhea, Iapetus (the father of Prometheus and Atlas), Cronus, 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, harking back to the vengeance they took for their own father, the Theogony links the name of the Titans to the root τιταίνων. Diodorus, on the other hand, links it to Τιταία, an ancient name for the Earth (Hist., III, 57; V, 66). Or else, taking as a starting point a conception that recognized in the Titans the gods of light (Empedocles uses Τιτάν to designate Ἰαβήρ [38, Diels], and Nonnus of Panopolis, at a much later date, calls the sun Ἥλιος Τιτήν [Dion. 19, 206]), some have sought to recognize in the Proto-Indo-European word "titan" the Indo-European synonym "deivo" = "god", just as the Latin "dies" comes from "dijeus-div". For which reason under this appellation the pre-Olympian gods would have been called in their totality (v. A. Nehring, in Glotta, 14 [1924], p. 167 ff.; P. Kretschmer, ibid., p. 309 f.). Subsequently the Titans came to fight with Zeus, who, aided by the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers — the latter freed from imprisonment — after a furious struggle lasting ten years (Th., 635 ff.) and which convulsed all the elements, succeeded in getting the better of these monstrous beings by driving them back into Tartarus. While in the Homeric poems there are only imprecise references (Iliad, I, 399; VIII, 477; Odyssey, VII, 59), in Hesiod's Theogony these struggles against Zeus acquire a prominent part in the so-called Titanomachy (629 ff.), which some consider later or self-contained (v. A. Koechly, De diversis Hesiodae theogoniae partibus, Turici 1860). Zeus's battle against the Titans symbolizes the accomplished triumph of the Olympian religion over the ancient gods and almost seeks to preserve the reflection, disguised in poetic images, of remote and profound telluric upheavals.

Lanfranco Fiore