Iapetus

Fifth among the children of Earth and Sky

In the Theogony, the early Greek poet Hesiod’s poem on the origins of the gods, Gaia, the Earth, lies with Uranus, the Sky, and bears a run of sons: Oceanus, then Coeus, Crius, Hyperion and Iapetus, with Kronos born last of all. These are the Titans, the gods who held power before Zeus and the Olympians.

Iapetus is named in that list and given no deed. What the texts give him instead is a place in the family and a line of sons.

Clymene, or Asia

Hesiod gives him a wife from the water. Iapetus takes Clymene, a daughter of Ocean, and goes up with her into one bed, and she bears him his sons. Apollodorus, who retold the myths in a handbook called the Library, tells the same marriage with a different woman in it: to Iapetus and Asia were born the four sons.

Neither text settles the difference. The sons are the same four in both, under the same names.

The four sons, and what Zeus does with each

Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus and Epimetheus are the sons of Iapetus, and Zeus settles the fate of each. Atlas, under hard constraint, holds up the wide heaven with unwearying head and arms, standing at the borders of the earth, a lot Hesiod says Zeus assigned to him. Prometheus is bound with cruel chains, a shaft driven through his middle, and an eagle set on him to eat his liver, which grows again by night as fast as the bird can devour it; Heracles, the hero son of Alcmene, kills the bird and releases him. Epimetheus is the one who first takes from Zeus the woman Zeus had made, and Hesiod calls him scatter-brained and a mischief to men who eat bread.

Menoetius ends differently in the two accounts. In Hesiod he is outrageous, and Zeus strikes him with a thunderbolt and sends him down to Erebus, a darkness Hesiod sets at the beginning of the world beside black Night, for his mad presumption and exceeding pride. In Apollodorus the blow falls during the battle with the Titans, and Zeus hurls him down to Tartarus, which Homer places at the lowest bounds of earth and sea.

Known by his father’s name

Hesiod often names Prometheus as the son of Iapetus. When gods and mortal men divide an ox, and Prometheus sets out the flesh hidden under the hide and the bare bones dressed in shining fat, Zeus addresses him as “Son of Iapetus, most glorious of all lords” and tells him how unfairly he has divided the portions. A few lines earlier in the poem, Heracles delivers the son of Iapetus from the eagle. In these lines the name works as a patronymic, a father’s name used of his son.

Where Homer leaves him

Homer puts Iapetus underground. Zeus, angry with his wife Hera, tells her he does not care if she goes to the nethermost bounds of earth and sea, where Iapetus and Kronos abide, taking joy neither in the rays of the sun nor in any breeze, with deep Tartarus round about them. The line is a threat aimed at Hera, and it is all the Iliad says of Iapetus.

The grandson who lands on Parnassus

The descent from Iapetus runs one generation further and comes to ground above Delphi. Prometheus has a son, Deucalion, and when Zeus sets out to destroy the men of the Bronze Age, Deucalion builds a chest on his father’s advice, stocks it with provisions and goes aboard with his wife Pyrrha. The rain floods the greater part of Greece. Deucalion drifts in the chest for nine days and nine nights, and in the account of Apollodorus it grounds on Parnassus, the mountain Delphi sits on.

He lands when the rain stops and sacrifices to Zeus. Allowed to choose what he wants, he asks for people, and at the bidding of Zeus he takes up stones and throws them over his head. The stones Deucalion throws become men, and the stones Pyrrha throws become women.

The flood as Delphi remembered it

The travel writer Pausanias tells the Delphian side of the same flood. The oldest city on that ground was founded by Parnassus, a son of the nymph Cleodora, and both the mountain and the glen took their name from him. That city was flooded by the rains that fell in the time of Deucalion, and the people who escaped the storm were led by the howls of wolves to safety on the top of Parnassus, where they founded a city called Lycoreia.