TITANS

                                                                                       THE TITANS

The Greeks did not believe that the gods created the universe.  It was the other way about: the universe created the gods. Before there were gods heaven and earth had been formed. They were the first parents. The Titans were their children, and the gods were their grandchildren.

The Titans, often called the Elder Gods, were for untold ages supreme in the universe. They were of enormous size and of incredible strength. There were many of them, but only a few appear in the stories of mythology. The most important was CRONUS, in Latin- Saturn. He ruled over the other Titans until his son Zeus dethroned him and seized the power for himself. The Romans said that when Jupiter, their name for Zeus, ascended the throne, Saturn fled to Italy and brought in the Golden Age, a time of perfect peace and happiness, which lasted as long as he reigned. The other notable Titans were OCEAN the river that was supposed to encircle the earth; his wife TETHYS; HYPERION, the father of the sun, the moon and the dawn; MNEMOSYNE, which means Memory; THEMIS, usually translated by Justice; and IAPETUS, important because of his sons Atlas, who bore the world on his shoulders, and PROMETHEUS, who was the savior of mankind. These alone among the order gods were not banished with the coming of Zeus but they took a lower place.
URANUS fathered the Titans upon Mother Earth, after he had thrown his rebellious sons, the Cyclopes, into Tartarus, a gloomy place in the Underworld, which lies as far distant from the earth as the earth does from the sky; it would take a falling anvil nine days to reach its bottom. In revenge, Mother Earth persuaded the Titans to attack their father; and they did so, led by Cronus, the youngest of the seven, whom she armed with a flint sickle. They surprised Uranus as he slept, and it was with the flint sickle that the merciless Cronus castrated him, grasping him and throwing him, and the sickle too, into the sea by Cape Drepanum. But drops of blood flowing from the wound fell upon Mother Earth, and she bore the Three Erinnyes, furies who avenge crimes of perjury — by name Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. The nymphs of the ash—tree, called the Meliae, also sprang from that blood.
 The Titans then released the Cyclopes from Tartarus and awarded the sovereignty of the earth to Cronus. However, no sooner did Cronus find himself in supreme command than he confined the Cyclopes to Tartarus again together with the Hundred-handed Ones and, taking his sister Rhea to wife, ruled in Elis.