Hyperion

A Titan in the first family

The early Greek poet Hesiod sets Hyperion in the first generation of gods. In his Theogony, a poem on how the gods came to be, Earth lies with starry Heaven and bears the gods later called the Titans: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion and Iapetus, and with them Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. Kronos is born last of them, and he hates his father.

Later in the poem Hesiod gives Hyperion a consort and three children. The consort is Theia, who stands beside him in the same list of brothers and sisters.

The three lights

Hesiod says that Theia was subject in love to Hyperion and bore Helios the sun, Selene the moon and Eos the dawn, who shines on all that are on earth and on the gods in the wide heaven. Apollodorus, who collected the myths in a book called the Library, gives the same three children to Hyperion and Theia: Dawn, Sun and Moon.

The Homeric Hymn to Helios, a short hymn sung to the sun, names a different mother. There it is Euryphaessa, the far-shining one, who bears the three children, and the hymn calls her Hyperion’s own sister. On his parents the hymn agrees with Hesiod, since it makes Hyperion a son of Earth and starry Heaven.

When Hyperion is the sun itself

Homer, the poet of the Odyssey, gives the name to the sun god himself. The poem opens on the loss of the crew of Odysseus, the hero whose homecoming it tells, and the men are called fools for devouring the cattle of Helios Hyperion, who took from them the day of their returning. The two are one god there, and Hyperion is a name of the sun.

Pindar, who wrote odes for victorious athletes, has them as father and son. In his ode for a boxer from Rhodes he calls the sun the god that brings light to mortals, son of Hyperion, which is the relation Hesiod gives.

The Cretan account at Knossos

Diodorus, who wrote a universal history, records another version and gives it as the myth the Cretans relate. In it the Titans are six brothers, Kronos, Hyperion, Coeus, Iapetus, Crius and Oceanus, and five sisters, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. They had their dwelling in the land about Knossos, on Crete. At that spot, Diodorus writes, the foundations of a house of Rhea and a grove of cypresses consecrated to her from ancient times were still being pointed out when he wrote.

The first to watch the sky

The Cretan account credits each of the Titans with the discovery of something useful to other people, and has them honoured for it. Hyperion was the first, Diodorus writes, to understand by close attention and observation the movement of the sun, the moon and the other stars, and the seasons those bodies cause, and the first to make those facts known to other men. For that he was called the father of those bodies, since he had begotten, so to speak, the enquiry into them and their nature.

Rhodes and the first altar

Pindar’s ode for the boxer gives Hyperion’s son a single act in it. Athena, a warrior goddess, leapt from the top of the head of her father Zeus, the king of the gods, and the Sky and mother Earth shuddered before her. The god that brings light to mortals, the son of Hyperion, then told his own children to be the first to build her an altar visible to all men, and with a burnt offering to warm the spirit of the father and of the daughter who thunders with her spear.

They climbed the hill without the seed of burning flame and founded the sacred precinct with fireless sacrifices. Seven sons were born to the sun god on the island, and one of them fathered Cameirus, Ialysus and Lindus, who divided their father’s land in three and gave the three cities of Rhodes their names.