The History and Significance of the Greek God Atlas

The mythology of ancient Greece has fascinated people of centuries and they have come to be known as the great myth-makers of Europe. It is from the ancient Greeks that we get the name by which we refer today to the amazing stories of gods, heroes, men and animals. Indeed, the myths from this great civilization has provided the inspiration for different types of artists, including poetry, literature, sculpture, paintings and in today’s contemporary society, movies.

One of the most popular myths from ancient Greece recounts the story of the Titan Atlas. The son of Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene, Atlas fought on the side of the Titans during the Titan War. As punishment, Zeus, after the Olympian gods won the battle, decreed that Atlas would hold up the sky upon his shoulders for the rest of eternity.

His most famous myth features the hero, Hercules (this hero’s name was spelt Hercules in Roman Latin and Herackles in Greek - for this article I will continue the spelling ‘Hercules’). One of Hercules labours was to collect the golden apples of the Hesperides, the female guardians of the fruit that Gaia presented Hera on her marriage to Zeus. Atlas offered to obtain these apples in Hercules would hold up the sky in his absence.

Atlas fetched the golden apples and suggested that he should deliver them as well since Hercules was holding the sky up so well. Tricking the Titan, Hercules agreed but asked whether Atlas would hold the sky for a minute in order to allow him to adjust the weight on his shoulders. Atlas agreed, eager to be free, but Hercules had tricked him and Atlas resumed his lonely duty.

His unusual punishment has been suggested that his conduct was in some way different from or worse than that of his fellows. What Atlas actually did may have been told in the lost epic, the Titanomachia, although not in the extant fragments. Although direct literary evidence for Atlas as a leader of the Titans is late, it does seem possible that he appeared in the Titanomachia (Matthews, p.232).

Within the fourth book of the Aeneid, the god Mercury flies to Carthage on Jupiter’s orders in order to encourage Aeneas to set sail, and the god sets foot on Atlas who is described as an old man. As Atlas had been punished to hold the sky up and so the anthropomorphic description, fusing mountain and man, may strike us as entirely appropriate. The description from the Aeneid is clearly modelled on a passage from the Odyssey. One scholar states that “The personification of the mountain as an old man … seems to us overdone …. To assign human characteristics to striking physical objects is common and natural; a lofty mountain may be a giant bearing heaven on his back, but when you begin to point out his eyes, nose, etc., the comparison becomes childish” (Morwood, p.52).

Atlas’s significance to the Romans can be found within the last line of the eighth book of the Aeneid where Atlas and Aeneas are compared. Atlas bears the weight of the world on his shoulders and Aeneas lifts on to his shoulder the shield made for him by Vulcan and with it the ‘famamque et fata nepotum’, the glorious destiny of his descendants (Morwood, p.56). Atlas, at once both Titan and mountain, is welded, through Virgil’s striking use of anthropomorphism, into a noble symbol of endurance, which is still seen to this day.

Bibliography:

Matthews, V. J. (1978) Atlas, Aietes and Minos Oloofpwn: An Epic Epithet in the Odyssey, Classical Philology, The University of Chicago Press.

Morwood, J. H. W. (1985) Aeneas and Mount Atlas, The Journal of Roman Studies, The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.