Coeus

A name in the Titan lists

The early Greek poet Hesiod, whose Theogony is a poem on the origins of the gods, names Coeus second in a list of twelve children that Gaia, the Earth, bore to Uranus, the Sky. The list ends with Cronos, the youngest of them. Those twelve are the Titans, the generation of gods who held power before Zeus and the Olympians. Coeus is named there and given no deed.

Apollodorus, who retold the myths in a book called the Library, gives his own list of the Titans and names Coeus in it as well. His roster of Titan daughters does not match Hesiod’s: it carries Dione, a name Hesiod’s list does not have. The Greek texts spell the name Koios.

The marriage to Phoebe

In Hesiod’s genealogy, the family tree of the gods, Phoebe comes to the bed of Coeus. She belongs to the same generation, a daughter of Gaia and Uranus like him. The couple have two daughters, Asteria and Leto, and Apollodorus names the same two.

Hesiod carries the line one generation further. Asteria conceives and bears Hecate, the goddess whom Zeus honours above all others. Leto bears the twins Apollo and Artemis. So the whole of what the sources record of Coeus’s own life is a marriage inside his own generation and the children that came of it.

Both daughters belong to Delos

In Apollodorus, Asteria escapes the advances of Zeus in the likeness of a quail by flinging herself into the sea. The place that was once called Asteria after her is afterwards named Delos. The poet Callimachus uses the older name throughout a hymn addressed to the island, and says plainly that Asteria was its name of old, since like a star it leapt from heaven into the deep water in flight from marriage with Zeus.

Leto then comes to the same ground. Hunted over the whole earth by Hera, she reaches Delos and bears Artemis first; Artemis acts as midwife, and Apollo is born after.

The father in the patronymic

Twice the texts reach for Coeus to say who Leto is. In the early hymn to Apollo, Leto stands on Delos and asks the island to take her son, and the island answers her by her father’s name: “Leto, most glorious daughter of great Coeus, joyfully would I receive your child the far-shooting lord.”

Callimachus names her the same way in his hymn to the island, in the scene where the river Peneius holds his ground for her and waits “until the daughter of Coeus called to him”. A patronymic, a name formed from the father’s, is how Greek poetry places a figure: it says which house she comes from. Coeus himself does nothing in either scene.