Did Atlas hold up the Earth or the sky?

The sky, in every early poet

Atlas is a son of the Titan Iapetus and a brother of Prometheus. After the war of the gods, Hesiod says, Zeus set him at the borders of the earth, near the Hesperides, the nymphs of the far west. Hesiod comes back to him once more, at the gates of the underworld, where night and day trade places:

the son of Iapetus stands immovably upholding the wide heaven upon his head and unwearying hands, where Night and Day draw near and greet one another as they pass the great threshold of bronze

Homer pictures columns instead. In the Odyssey, the nymph Calypso is the daughter of Atlas, who “carries the great columns that keep heaven and earth asunder” (Odyssey 1.52–54). In Prometheus Bound, Prometheus grieves for his brother, who stands in the west bearing “the pillar of heaven and earth” on his shoulders (347–350). Sky, or the pillars that hold it apart. Never the Earth.

Why he got the job

Hesiod names no crime. He calls the sky simply the lot Zeus assigned, in the same passage where Zeus strikes down another brother, Menoetius, with a thunderbolt for his pride, and binds Prometheus (Theogony 510–522). Retellings usually make it the price of losing the war against the Olympians.

Later stories give him visitors. Apollodorus has Heracles take the sky on his own shoulders while Atlas fetches the golden apples of the Hesperides; Atlas returns and tries to leave the hero holding it, and Heracles tricks him into taking it back (2.5.11). Ovid has Perseus show him the Gorgon’s head, and the giant becomes a mountain: his beard and hair turn to forest, his shoulders to ridges, and the stars still rest on him (Metamorphoses 4).

Where the globe came from

The globe arrived with Roman art. The Farnese Atlas, a marble of about AD 150 in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, bends under a great sphere. Look closely and it is the sky: the globe is carved with constellations, among them Aries the ram, Cygnus the swan and Hercules. It is the oldest known statue of Atlas and the oldest known image of the classical constellations on a globe. Later viewers saw a ball on a Titan’s back and took it for the world, and the picture stuck.

A mountain range, a bone and a book

His name stayed on the map. The Atlas Mountains run across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia; Herodotus heard that the people there called their mountain the pillar of heaven (Histories 4.184), and the ocean beyond is still the Atlantic, the sea of Atlas. The first vertebra of the neck, which carries the skull, is the atlas.

The book of maps comes from Gerardus Mercator. His Atlas, published in Duisburg in 1595, the year after his death, set out to describe the whole created world, not just to collect maps. In the preface he explains that he named it for Atlas as a learned king of Mauretania, a philosopher and astronomer: the Titan turned scholar. Every book of maps since has borrowed the name.