The Titan Counter

Add the second generation and watch twelve become twenty-five. Tap any Titan for how they ended.

The original twelve

In Hesiod's Theogony, the first Titans are the twelve children of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth): six brothers — Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus and Cronus — and six sisters — Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. They were the elemental powers that ran the cosmos before the Olympians existed.

The youngest brother, Cronus, set everything in motion. Encouraged by his mother Gaia, he ambushed and castrated his father Uranus to seize power — then, warned that one of his own children would do the same to him, he swallowed each baby as it was born. His wife Rhea hid the youngest, Zeus, and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead. That single deception is the hinge the whole mythology turns on.

The Titans you actually know

Here is the twist most lists miss: the most famous Titans are not in the founding twelve at all. Atlas, holding the sky on his shoulders, and Prometheus, who stole fire for humankind and was chained to a rock, are both sons of the first-generation Titan Iapetus — the second generation.

So are the lights of the sky: Helios the sun, Selene the moon and Eos the dawn, all children of Hyperion. And Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis, is a Titaness too. When people picture "a Titan," they almost always picture the children, not the parents — which is exactly why the count depends on where you draw the line.

The war that defines them: the Titanomachy

The Titans are, at heart, the losers of a cosmic civil war. When Zeus grew up, he forced Cronus to disgorge his swallowed siblings and led them in revolt. The result was the Titanomachy — a ten-year war between the Titans, based on Mount Othrys, and the Olympians, based on Mount Olympus.

Zeus broke the deadlock by freeing the monstrous Cyclopes and the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires, whom Uranus had imprisoned. The grateful Cyclopes forged Zeus his thunderbolt; the Hecatoncheires hurled a hundred boulders at once. The Titans were crushed. The male Titans who had fought were cast down into Tartarus, the deepest pit of the cosmos, with the Hecatoncheires set as their guards.

But not all of them fell. Oceanus stayed neutral and kept his river. Prometheus and Epimetheus had sided with the winning Olympians. And the Titanesses Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne were folded into the new order — Themis became Zeus's counsellor, and Mnemosyne bore him the nine Muses. To be a Titan was not always to be punished; it was to belong to the world that came before.

The Titans are still everywhere

Their name became a word for sheer scale — anything titanic — and was given, with grim irony, to a ship that proved it couldn't beat the elements. In 1795 the chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth named a newly identified element titanium after the Titans, for its strength.

And they hang in the sky. Cronus became the Roman Saturn, and astronomers carried the family up to the planet: Saturn's largest moon is Titan, and many of its others — Rhea, Iapetus, Tethys, Phoebe, Hyperion, Atlas, Prometheus and Epimetheus — are named for the Titans you've just counted. The gods who lost the heavens ended up named across them.

Frequently asked

Sources

• Hesiod, Theogony (c. 700 BC) — the twelve Titans, their parents Uranus and Gaia, and the Titanomachy.
• Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.1–1.2 — genealogy of the Titans and the war with the Olympians.
• Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound — the punishment of Prometheus, second-generation Titan.
• The identification of Cronus with the Roman Saturn — standard in classical mythography.
• Titanium named after the Titans by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, 1795; Saturn\u2019s moons named for Titans by the IAU.

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