What is the difference between the Titans and the Olympians?

Parents and children

In Hesiod’s Theogony, Earth and Sky have twelve Titans, six sons and six daughters: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys and, youngest of all, Kronos (Theogony 133–138). Hesiod says their father gave them the name in reproach, calling them Titans, Strainers, because they reached too far (207–210).

The Olympians take their name from their home on Mount Olympus. The first of them are Kronos and Rhea’s six children: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus. Their father swallowed five of them at birth until Zeus made him give them back (the whole story). The rest are mostly the next generation again: Zeus’s children Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes and Ares, and Hera’s son Hephaestus. Later Greeks spoke of the Twelve Gods, though the lists vary, and Hades, who lives below, is usually left out.

So this is not gods against monsters. Hesiod calls both sides gods. The line between them is a generation, and a side in a war.

Is Prometheus a Titan?

Strictly, he is a Titan’s son. His father Iapetus is one of the twelve, and Hesiod gives Iapetus four sons: Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus and Epimetheus (Theogony 507–514). That makes Prometheus a cousin of Zeus. Later poets simply call him a Titan, and in Prometheus Bound the chorus counts Atlas as another Titan god in chains beside him. Other Titans’ children joined the new order. Leto, daughter of Coeus and Phoebe, became the mother of Apollo and Artemis (Theogony 404–408). In the second generation, the two families blur.

Ten years of war

The Titanomachy, the war of the Titans, pits Olympus against Mount Othrys across the plain of Thessaly. Hesiod says it lasted ten full years, evenly balanced, with no end in sight (Theogony 629–638). Earth shows Zeus the way out: release the prisoners still held under the ground. The one-eyed Cyclopes forge his thunderbolt. The Hundred-Handers, Cottus, Briareos and Gyes, hurl boulders. Then Zeus holds nothing back:

The boundless sea rang terribly around, and the earth crashed loudly: wide Heaven was shaken and groaned, and high Olympus reeled from its foundation under the charge of the undying gods

The beaten Titans go down to Tartarus behind gates of bronze, with the Hundred-Handers on guard. In Aeschylus, Prometheus says he went over to Zeus after the Titans scorned his advice to win by cunning instead of force (Prometheus Bound 204–221).

Dividing the world

With the war won, the three brothers drew lots. Homer lets Poseidon tell it, and Samuel Butler’s translation keeps the Latin names of its day:

When we cast lots, it fell to me to have my dwelling in the sea for evermore; Hades took the darkness of the realms under the earth, while air and sky and clouds were the portion that fell to Jove; but earth and great Olympus are the common property of all.

Not every Titan was punished. Themis and Mnemosyne became wives of Zeus and mothers of the Seasons and the Muses (Theogony 901–917). The old powers live on inside the new order, and in our words: titanic still means huge, and Olympian means calm and above the fray. The Olympic Games, though, are named for Olympia, a sanctuary of Zeus in the western Peloponnese, not for the mountain. The Romans renamed the winners, too: Jupiter, Juno and the rest.