Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’ll be discussing Atlas,
the titan condemned to hold the sky up upon his shoulders for all of eternity, the Titan - because
of his incredible power, unbreakable will, and superlative leadership - who was singled-out
and saddled with a bespoke punishment that was even worse than being cast down into the depths
of Tartarus, as was the fate of all the other male Titans who fought against Zeus in the Titanomachy.
Let’s get into it.
Said to be a wise man and sometimes said to be the father of astronomy,
Atlas was the Titan saddled with the unending burden of holding up the heavens on his shoulders,
functioning as a living pillar that separated earth from sky. He could be found, locked between
Gaia and Uranus, in the far West, near the edge of the world, adjacent to where the Hesperides
dwelt. (We’ll come back to the Hesperides later on.) And because of the tireless effort required
for his perpetual task, Atlas was associated with endurance and resilience, both for mind and body.
The first generation Titans comprised the original 12 titans who were the progeny
of two primordial deities. The two were Gaia, the personification of the earth, and Uranus,
the personification of the sky. Atlas’ father was Iapetus, one of the original 12 Titans,
and his mother was Clymene, one of the Oceanids, which was a group of 3,000 water nymphs who were
the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys, both of them also first generation Titans. Atlas, along with
his three brothers, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Menoetius, were second generation Titans.
Unlike the other titans who fought against Zeus and Olympus during the Titanomachy,
which was the cataclysmic 10 year war that raged between the gods and the Titans,
Atlas wasn’t condemned to an eternity of imprisonment in the depths of Tartarus. No,
his special and sadistic punishment was to forever hold up the heavens upon his shoulders. And yes,
you heard that right. In Greek mythology, Atlas holds up the sky, not the earth,
despite what his iconography commonly depicts. The mythographer Hyginus explained that Atlas'
leadership role during the Titanomachy was why, even among his incredibly powerful Titan brethren,
he was singled out and sentenced to such diabolical damnation. Unlike Atlas,
neither Prometheus nor Epimetheus sided with the Titans; rather, they cast their lot in
with the gods and were thus spared the doom that awaited the belligerent members of their
cohort who fought against Zeus and the forces who followed him. Of Menoetius, not much is known. In
Hesiod’s Theogony, it says that “the lawless Menoetius was sent down to the darkness by
wide-seeing Zeus with a smoking bolt, because of his wickedness and overbearing strength.”
Atlas sired many children. Among them were the Hesperides, Calypso, the Pleiades,
and the Hyades. The Hesperides were a group of nymphs who typically numbered between four and
seven. They tended the tree that bore golden apples. Gaia gifted this tree to Hera when she
married Zeus. Calypso was a nymph or minor earth goddess who dwelt in a cave surrounded by lush
wilderness. Odysseus comes across her on his way home from the Trojan war. She loved Odysseus and
offered to make him immortal, but the hero longed to be reunited with his wife and son.
Odysseus was waylaid for seven years and was only released because Athena implored Zeus to do so,
the king of the gods then dispatching Hermes to treat with Calypso and see that the hero
was indeed allowed to go free. The Pleiades and the Hyades were two groups of nymphs,
both of them eventually set into the sky as star clusters.
Atlas had two notable interactions with heroes, one with Perseus and one with Hercules.
Perseus, After slaying Medusa and collecting her severed head, used his winged sandals and took to
the skies. Capricious winds blew Perseus so that every sea and every continent passed below him,
until finally, overcome by fatigue, Perseus alighted at the world’s end, where Atlas was
imprisoned by the weight of the sky bearing down on him. Perseus asked Atlas for hospitality,
but Atlas, who had learnt from an oracle that a son of Zeus would despoil his sacred trees by
taking their golden apples, refused him. Scorned, Perseus unveiled and held up Medusa’s severed head
before Atlas, who was turned to stone when he looked upon the Gorgon’s hideous face.
Atlas also encountered Hercules during the hero's 11th labor, which was to retrieve
the golden apples of the Hesperides. Hercules met Atlas, who offered to fetch the apples if Hercules
would temporarily hold the sky up in his place. Hercules agreed, but Atlas was reluctant to resume
his plight, having already borne the sky for years uncounted. Hercules, though, was able to extricate
himself from his predicament with some quick thinking. He asked Atlas if he could briefly hold
up the sky for him while he found something to cushion his shoulders with, but of course, after
the switch was made, Hercules took the apples and left Atlas imprisoned once more, never returning.
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