Atlas

The two oldest pictures of Atlas

The oldest surviving mention of Atlas is in the Odyssey, an early Greek epic poem. Homer, its poet, says Atlas knows the depths of every sea and holds the tall pillars that keep earth and heaven apart. He calls him “of baneful mind”, which renders the Greek word oloophron.

Hesiod, the early Greek poet, gives the other picture. In the Theogony, Atlas holds up the wide heaven itself, with unwearying head and arms, standing at the borders of the earth in front of the Hesperides, the nymphs who guard the golden apples.

Hesiod gives one line on why: this lot wise Zeus assigned to him. The Theogony names no offence it answers.

Where in the world he stands

Hesiod puts Atlas at the western edge of the world, in front of the Hesperides. Apollodorus, who compiled the myths in a book called the Library, places him elsewhere. The golden apples were not in Libya, as some have said, but on Atlas among the Hyperboreans, a people the Greeks placed far to the north. In that telling Heracles, the hero sent to fetch the apples as one of his labours, walks north rather than west for them.

Herodotus, who wrote a history of the Persian wars, reports something else again. In north Africa there is a mountain called Atlas, slender and conical, whose heights are never out of cloud. The people of the country, he says, call it the pillar of heaven. Herodotus does not tie the mountain to the Titan.

The trick Heracles plays on him

Apollodorus tells in full the episode of the golden apples, a contest of wits. Eurystheus, the king Heracles serves, sets him to fetch the golden apples. Prometheus, Atlas’s brother, advises Heracles not to go after them himself but to send Atlas, first relieving him of the sphere, the weight of the sky.

Heracles takes the sky, and Atlas comes back with three apples from the Hesperides. He does not want the weight again. He says he will carry the apples on to Eurystheus himself, and tells Heracles to go on holding the sky in his place.

Heracles agrees, then asks one thing: hold it again for a moment, while he puts a pad on his head. Atlas lays the apples on the ground and takes the sphere back. Heracles picks the apples up and goes. Apollodorus adds that some say the apples never passed through Atlas’s hands at all, and that Heracles killed the guardian snake and plucked them himself.

Atlas at Olympia

Atlas stood twice in the sanctuary at Olympia. The Temple of Zeus, begun around 470 BC and finished before 456 BC, carried 12 carved panels above its two porches, six at each end, showing the Labours of Heracles. Pausanias, who described Greece for travellers, lists them, and among them Heracles is about to receive the burden of Atlas.

Pausanias saw Atlas a second time inside the temple of Hera, on a cedar chest. The Cypselids had dedicated it at Olympia; their ancestor, the Corinthian ruler Kypselos, had been hidden in it as a child. On the chest Atlas carries heaven and earth on his shoulders, with the apples in his hands, and a man with a sword comes towards him. Pausanias says everyone recognises that man as Heracles, though the inscription he copied out does not name him: “Here is Atlas holding heaven, but he will let go the apples.”

The chest is lost. One of the temple’s panels, found at Olympia in 1829 and showing Heracles with the Cretan bull, is in the Louvre in Paris.

What the name came to mean

Modern scholars derive the name from the root of tlao, to bear or to endure. Two further uses of the word are ancient. In building, the plural atlantes is the term for a colossal carved human figure used as a support. In the body, the same word named the vertebra of the neck that carries the head.