Theia

A name in the first family

The early Greek poet Hesiod sets Theia in the first generation of gods. His Theogony, a poem on how the gods came to be, has Earth lie with starry Heaven and bear the powers later called the Titans. Theia is named in that catalogue, in the same line as Rhea, and with them come Themis, Mnemosyne, gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. Her brothers stand in the same list, and one of them, Hyperion, becomes her consort later in the poem.

The mother of the three lights

Later in the Theogony Hesiod gives her those children. Theia was subject in love to Hyperion, he writes, and bore great Helios the sun, clear Selene the moon, and Eos the dawn, who shines on all that are on earth and on the deathless gods who live in the wide heaven.

Apollodorus, who collected the myths in a book called the Library, repeats the parentage. He gives Dawn, Sun and Moon to Hyperion and Thia, the spelling of her name that his text carries.

Pindar’s address

Pindar, who wrote odes for victorious athletes, opens Isthmian 5 by addressing her directly as mother of the Sun, Theia of many names. The Greek puts the address in the first line of the ode and gives her the epithet polyonymos, which means of many names. For her sake, Pindar says, men honour gold as more powerful than anything else, and through the value she bestows on them, ships contending on the sea and yoked teams of horses in swift-whirling contests become marvels.

The ode was written for Phylacidas, an athlete of Aegina, whose twofold excellence Pindar records at the Isthmus and at Nemea. The poet says he has come for the sons of Lampon to this well-governed city.

Where the lists disagree

The rosters of the first gods do not match. Hesiod gives six Titan daughters: Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. Apollodorus names seven, adding Dione to the same group.

A second account replaces her. The Homeric Hymn to Helios, a short hymn sung to the sun god, gives the three lights a different mother. There Hyperion wedded glorious Euryphaessa, called his own sister, who bore him lovely children. The hymn keeps Hesiod’s father and changes the mother.

The Cretan version that Diodorus reports leaves her out. In it the Titans are six brothers and five sisters, and the sisters are Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys. Theia is not among them.