Titan of Greek mythology who bore the sky
Atlas
Atlas is a Titan of Greek mythology, son of Iapetus, whom Zeus condemned to hold up the heavens at the western edge of the world. His name lives on in the word for a book of maps, the architectural atlas and the Atlantic Ocean.
The myth
According to tradition, Atlas led the Titans in the Titanomachy, the war against the Olympians. When the Titans were defeated, Zeus condemned him to carry the sky on his shoulders. Hesiod places him at the western edge of the world, near the garden of the Hesperides, while Homer describes him guarding the long columns that hold up the sky. His epithet, Telamon, refers to that punishment of enduring a great weight.
His genealogy varies from source to source. The most common version makes him a son of Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene or Asia, and a brother of Prometheus, Epimetheus and Menoetius. With different consorts, such as Aethra or Pleione, he fathered the Pleiades, the Hyades and the Hesperides. Hyginus, however, counts him among the giants and calls him a son of Earth and Aether. In some accounts, the Pleiades gave rise to several heroic lineages.
In another episode, Atlas receives Perseus, who shows him the head of Medusa and turns him to stone; his remains became the Atlas mountain range. Ovid adds that Atlas had received a prophecy about a son of Zeus who would steal his golden apples, and so he refused Perseus hospitality. In another version, Heracles tricks Atlas into fetching the apples of the Hesperides: he asks him to hold the sky for a moment while he adjusts his cloak, then walks off with the fruit.
Diodorus Siculus offers a rational reading: Atlas was a king of Mauretania, a wise astronomer and mathematician who made the first celestial globe, and from this came the image of a man carrying the heavens. Plato, meanwhile, mentions another Atlas, the first king of Atlantis, a son of Poseidon and the mortal woman Cleito.
Worship and religion
At Olympia, according to Pausanias, a temple of Zeus displayed a wooden image of Atlas. No sanctuaries or festivals dedicated to the Titan are known, and his worship does not survive today.
Legacy
Gerardus Mercator honored a king named Atlas on the title page of his 1595 book of maps, and from this comes the use of the word atlas for a collection of maps. The Atlantic takes its name from the 'Sea of Atlas', and Plato's Atlantis derives from the 'Atlantean Island'. Ayn Rand titled her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, comparing businesspeople to Atlas holding up the world. In anatomy, the atlas is the first vertebra of the spine, and in psychology the term Atlas personality describes someone who carried excessive responsibility in childhood.
Ancient sources: Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, Hyginus, Pausanias, Diodorus Siculus and Plato mention him in their works.
In art
