Titans
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Titans. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
ti'tanz, in Greek mythology, a race of gods, children of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth). According to the poets, there were six male titans: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Japetus, and Cronus; and six females: Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Tethys. Instigated by their mother, they deposed their father and set Cronus in his place. To do this they released the hundred-handed giants and the cyclops from Tartarus where Uranus had confined them. When Cronus came to power, he again imprisoned the giants and the cyclops. Later Zeus, the son of Cronus, caused his father to disgorge the children he had swallowed at birth, and led them against his father. After a terrible war of ten years Cronus was dethroned. Zeus was obliged also to summon the prisoners from Tartarus before he could win the victory. From the cyclops he received the lightning which Minerva had invented and taught them to make. The triumphant Zeus, like his predecessors, did not care to have hundred-handed giants and "round-eyed" monsters roaming freely in his domain. He therefore shut them up again in Tartarus, where the cyclops work at the forge of Hephaestus. The titans during their wars were said to have tried to scale heaven by piling mountain upon mountain. They took up Mount Ossa and piled it upon Mount Pelion, whence the proverbial expression, "to pile Ossa upon Pelion." It is thought that Milton drew his notions of Satan's rebellion from the story of the Titan's War. The descendants of the titans, Prometheus, Helios, and Silene, are also called titans. In general, a titan is regarded as a giant, the embodiment of lawless strength. See Cronus ; Zeus ; Cyclops
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in Greek mythology, were six sons and six daughters of Uranos and Gaia, named Okeanos, Koios, Kreios, Hyperion, Iapetos, and Kronos; Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnēmosnynē, Phoibē, and Tethys. Uranos having banished to Tartarus the Hekatoncheires ("the hundredhanded") and the Cyclopes, Gaia called the Titans to avenge their brothers. They rose and freed them, deposed Uranos, and set Kronos in his place. Kronos and the Titans were in their turns put down by the sons of Kronos and Rhea, named the Olympioi, with Zeus at their head, but not till after a long struggle, in which Zeus brought to his aid the Cyclopes and Hekatoncheires, whom Kronos had again imprisoned in Tartarus. Zeus quelled the Titans with the lightning given him by the Cyclopes, hurled them to Tartarus, placing them under the care of the Hekatoncheires. This struggle, called the Titanomachia, was regarded as sym bolic of the conflict of reason and order with the rude forces of nature.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The genealogies Aiton's gave in 1910 and Collier's in 1921 are still the ones printed today, since both simply follow Hesiod's Theogony. What has moved is the context: cuneiform tablets excavated at Hattusa in Anatolia and deciphered from the 1930s and 1940s revealed the Hurrian-Hittite Song of Kumarbi, a succession myth in which sky-god, castrating son and storm-god follow one another much as Uranus, Cronus and Zeus do, so the Titanomachy is now read as a Greek version of a much older Near Eastern story rather than as homegrown Greek allegory. Collier's gloss that the war symbolised "the conflict of reason and order with the rude forces of nature" is a nineteenth-century reading few classicists would offer now. One small correction: the piling of Ossa on Pelion, which Aiton's attributes to the Titans, belongs in Homer to the Aloadae, Otus and Ephialtes.
Written for this edition, 2026.