The Titans

The Titans were the elder race of gods, the twelve mighty children of Gaia and Ouranos, who ruled the cosmos in the age before the Olympians. Among them were Kronos, their leader, and Rhea, along with Oceanus, Hyperion (father of the Sun), Themis, Mnemosyne (mother of the Muses), and Iapetus, father of Prometheus.

Their reign ended in the Titanomachy, the ten-year war in which Zeus and his siblings, aided by the Cyclopes' thunderbolts, defeated the Titans and cast them down into Tartarus. The myth tells the passage from an older, vaster, half-formed divine order to the articulated rule of the Olympians — and in the Orphic story of the Titans' devouring of the child Dionysus, from whose ashes humankind arose, the Greeks found the dark origin of the soul's bondage in the body.