Who were the twelve Titans of Greek myth?

What the original texts say

The familiar list of the twelve Titans of Greek mythology is Hesiod's. His Theogony, composed around 750–650 BC, says that Earth lay with Heaven and bore Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys, and after them Cronus, "the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children." That makes six sons and six daughters, though the poem never gives a number.

Heaven hid each child away in a secret place of Earth as soon as it was born. Earth, groaning within, made a great sickle of grey flint, and when Heaven came at nightfall, Cronus struck from ambush and castrated him. Heaven then called his sons Titans, "Strainers", in reproach: they had strained and done a presumptuous deed, and vengeance for it would come afterwards.

Cronus became king of the Titans and took his sister Rhea as his consort. Told by Earth and starry Heaven that he was destined to be overcome by his own son, he swallowed his children as they were born: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. Rhea was sent to Crete to give birth to Zeus, Earth took the baby to raise, and Cronus swallowed a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead.

Once grown, Zeus forced Cronus to bring up the siblings he had swallowed, and the Titans and the gods born of Cronus fought for ten full years. On Earth's advice the gods brought up the Hundred-Handers, Cottus, Briareos and Gyes, whose three hundred rocks overshadowed the Titans. The defeated Titans were bound in chains and hidden in a dank, gloomy place at the ends of the earth.

How the versions differ

Hesiod's twelve is not the only list. The mythological handbook known as the Library of Apollodorus names six Titans and seven Titanides, adding Dione to Hesiod's names: thirteen in all. In that version all the Titans except Ocean attack their father, the Furies are born from the drops of his blood, Zeus is born in a cave of Dicte and nursed by the Curetes and two nymphs, and after ten years of war the Titans are shut up in Tartarus with the Hundred-Handers as their guards.

Diodorus Siculus, recording the myth as the Cretans told it, counts eleven: six men and five women, without Theia. Their parents were Heaven and Earth according to some writers of myths, or one of the Curetes and a mother named Titaea, from whom they took their name. The Cretans placed their home around Cnosus, where the foundations of a house of Rhea and a cypress grove sacred to her were still pointed out, and each Titan was remembered for discovering something of benefit to mankind.

Even Cronus's end varies. Britannica notes versions in which he becomes a prisoner in Tartarus or a king in Elysium, and a tradition that his reign was a golden age for mortals.

How scholars explain it

Is the Greek Titans story real? The Titans are gods of ancient Greek religion and myth, known from poems and handbooks, not people with a historical record; even Diodorus presents his Cretan account as a myth the Cretans relate. According to Britannica, Cronus was worshipped by the pre-Hellenic population of Greece but probably not widely by the Greeks themselves, although Attica held a harvest festival for him, the Kronia, which resembled the Roman Saturnalia.

Scholars have long noted a parallel in the east. In a 2011 article in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, Erik van Dongen compares the Theogony with a Hurro-Hittite text also known as the Song of Kumarbi or the Song of Kingship in Heaven. In both, the sky god, Anu or Ouranos, is castrated by his successor, Kumarbi or Cronus. Both successors carry children inside them, both mean to eat a child and are fed a stone instead, and the stone becomes an object of worship. The passage in which the storm god takes the throne is lost from the Hittite text, but it seems certain that he did. Van Dongen concludes that "a historical connection has to be assumed."

The route is less clear. The story may have reached the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age, van Dongen suggests, through western Anatolia or by sea from Syria, Cilicia and Cyprus, or only later, in the Iron Age. He also notes that the Hurrians and Hittites knew a group of primeval gods who lived in the netherworld, driven into the earth by the storm god according to one ritual text, and that the Titans have often been connected with such figures.

Inside the poem, the Greek Titans legend serves Zeus. Van Dongen argues that Hesiod shaped the succession story so that Zeus stands out against his predecessors, Ouranos and Cronus; in it, Zeus must win a ten-year war against the Titans before he can really be proclaimed king.

Later retellings

Cronus was later identified with the Roman god Saturn, and as Saturn he appears in Francisco de Goya's painting of the swallowing myth, which the Museo del Prado calls one of the most expressive images of his Black Paintings. Goya painted it between 1820 and 1823 on a wall of his house, the Quinta del Sordo. Baron Émile d'Erlanger, who acquired the house in 1873, had the murals transferred to canvas, and they have been on view at the Prado since 1889. The museum suggests the god may personify the fear of losing one's power.

The Titans also reached the sky. Saturn's moon Iapetus, discovered by Cassini in 1671, was named by John Herschel for one of the Titans; Rhea and Tethys carry the names of Titanesses; Hyperion, discovered in 1848, was named by William Lassell for a Titan; and Phoebe, found in 1898, was named by William Pickering for a Titaness. Titan itself, discovered by Christiaan Huygens in 1655, takes the name of the whole generation, and Dione, Apollodorus's extra Titaness, has a moon too.

Questions people ask

Verdict

In Hesiod the Titans are Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys and Cronus, the generation of gods that Zeus and the Olympians overthrew. That list is securely documented, but it is one poet's count; Apollodorus names thirteen and Diodorus eleven. The Titans belong to myth and cult rather than history. How their story took shape, and how it came to share so much with a Hurro-Hittite song, is still argued over. Real or Legend files this as disputed.