In Greek mythology, the Titans (in ancient Greek / Titán Titãnes in the plural) are the giant primordial deities who preceded the Gods of Olympus.
Titans and Titanides
They are the children of Ouranos (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Their genealogy is given by Hesiod in his Theogony. Their number generally varies between twelve and fourteen:Hesiod recognizes six sons and six daughters (known under the name of Titanides (in ancient Greek Tιτάνις and Tιτάνιδες in the plural) who remained neutral during the war of the Titans, the Titanomachy) while the Orphic tradition mentions seven Titans of each sex.
* The Titans:
o Coeos,
o Crios,
o Cronos,
o Hyperion,
o Iapetus,
o Ocean (according to Hesiod, eldest of the six brothers and only male Titan not to have fought Zeus and the Olympians);
* The Titanides:
o Mnemosyne,
o Phoebe,
o Rhea,
o Theia,
o Themis,
o Tethys.
Although the name of Titan applies, in the strict sense, only to the twelve given previously, it is often extended to part of the descent of these, and in particular Prometheus, Epimetheus, Atlas, Hesperos and Menoetios; Hecate; Asteria and Leto; Eos, Helios and Selene; Perses, Pallas and Astraeos, Astraea, Eosphoros and Hesperos, etc.
Also sometimes counted as Titans are archaic deities such as Eurynome, Ophion, Lelantos, Aura, Anytos, Aristeas, Typhon or Dione, as for example, in the Orphic tradition which mentions Phorcys as the seventh Titan and Dione as the seventh Titanide. It will be noted that the number of Titans, in connection with the seven "planets" known to the ancients, is also fourteen in the Pelasgian Creation Myth as the British writer and mythographer Robert Graves, though sometimes considered unreliable, has thought I could put it back together.
Myth
The first children of Ouranos and Gaia were the three Hecatonchires, each having fifty heads and a hundred hands, and the three Cyclops, each having a single eye. The twelve Titans came next.
However, Ouranos, first ruler of the world, considering his offspring monstrous and fearing for his crown, dispatched the Hecatonchires and the Cyclopes to Tartarus, the lowest region of the Underworld.
Furious, Gaia incited the Titans to overthrow Ouranos, but only Cronos (the younger) reacted. He waited for his father with a sickle, castrated him and threw his bloody cock into the ocean.
Thus fertilized by the sex of Ouranos, the waves formed a foam from which, off the island of Cythera, Aphrodite was born, as the etymology of her name suggests (in Greek, Ἀφρός / Aphrós means foam). According to Aelian, Aphrodite was born inside a shell and it was in this shell that she arrived in Cythera.
According to some sources, the Erinyes (called Furies by the Romans) as well as the Giants were also born from this ultimate fertilization of the Ocean by Ouranos; according to other sources, it is rather Gaia, fertilized by the blood of Ouranos, which would have generated the Erinyes, the Meliades and the Giants.
With the help of the Hecatonchires and the Cyclopes he had freed from Tartarus, Cronos overthrew Ouranos and thus became master of the world and the heavens; but, fearing in his turn that someone close to him would rob him of the place, he sent them back to Tartarus.
He also made a habit of swallowing his own children born to his sister Rhea because his mother, Gaia, had prophesied that, like his father, he would be dethroned by one of his children.
Pregnant again, Rhea takes refuge in Crete and gives birth to her last born, Zeus, in a cave on Mount Ida, and in order to protect him from his father, she gives him a stone wrapped in a swaddle, claiming that this is the last born.
As an adult, Zeus revolted against his father's tyranny. He first asked the Océanide Métis to help him; she made Cronos swallow a powerful emetic and the latter began to return first the stone and then the children he had swallowed. Then, with the help of his brothers, Zeus engaged in and won the Titanomachy, the war against Cronos and the Titans who had remained loyal to him. During this war, Zeus also saved the Hecatonchires and the Cyclopes, still held in Tartarus. He is helped in this by Arges, Brontes and Steropes, who provided him with lightning.
After his victory, Zeus shares the world with his brothers Poseidon and Hades. Zeus got the Sky, Poseidon the Sea and Hades the Shadow World. This stable world prefigures the one in which men will be able to live; but another war is brewing, the gigantomachy, the confrontation between the Gods of Olympus and the Giants