Atlas in Greek Mythology: The Titan Who Holds Up the Sky

Atlas is the Titan who holds up the sky. He is a son of the Titan Iapetus and a brother of Prometheus, and in Hesiod's Theogony he stands at the western edge of the world, near the Hesperides, holding up the wide heaven on his head and tireless arms because Zeus assigned him that lot. He carries the sky, not the earth: the globe on the shoulders of the best-known ancient statue of Atlas is the heavens, not our planet.

Atlas quick facts

Does Atlas hold up the earth or the sky?

The sky. The ancient accounts put the weight of heaven on Atlas, and none has him carrying the earth as a ball. Hesiod says he holds up the wide heaven with his head and hands. Homer's Odyssey says he keeps the tall pillars that hold earth and sky apart. In Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Prometheus pities his brother standing in the west, bearing on his shoulders the pillar of heaven and earth. Pausanias, describing paintings and carvings at Olympia, has him holding up heaven and earth together.

The globe came later, from art. The best-known ancient image is the Farnese Atlas, a Roman marble statue now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, which shows the kneeling Titan carrying a sphere carved with constellations. That sphere is the sky, a celestial globe. Modern viewers tend to read any globe as the earth, and so the idea of Atlas holding up the world took hold.

Why does Atlas hold up the sky?

Hesiod gives no crime. In the Theogony, Iapetus' four sons all come to grief: Menoetius is struck down to Erebus by Zeus's thunderbolt for his arrogance, Prometheus is chained for tricking Zeus, and Epimetheus accepts Pandora. Of Atlas the poem says only that he holds the sky under hard constraint, because this was the lot that Zeus assigned him.

The link to the war of the gods comes from a later source. The Fabulae, a Latin handbook attributed to Hyginus, says the Titans attacked Jupiter under Atlas' leadership, and that after their defeat Jupiter put the vault of the sky on Atlas' shoulders as his punishment. Hesiod's own account of the Titanomachy never names Atlas as a fighter. So the popular version, that Atlas was the Titans' general and was sentenced for it, is real, but it is Roman-era and not in the oldest poet.

Where exactly he stands also shifts. Hesiod places him at the ends of the earth before the Hesperides, and later near the gloomy region of Tartarus, where Night and Day pass each other at a great bronze threshold. Either way, he is at the far edge of the world, where the sky comes down to meet it.

How did Heracles trick Atlas?

This is the story most people know, and its fullest version is in the Library of Apollodorus. For his eleventh labour, Heracles had to bring back the golden apples of the Hesperides, guarded by an immortal hundred-headed serpent. Prometheus, whom Heracles had just freed, advised him not to fetch the apples himself but to send Atlas and hold up the sky in his place.

Heracles took the weight. Atlas came back with three apples, and he had no wish to take the sky back. He offered to carry the apples to Eurystheus himself. Heracles, again on Prometheus' advice, pretended to agree and asked Atlas to hold the sky for a moment while he put a pad on his head. Atlas set down the apples and took the load. Heracles picked up the apples and left.

Apollodorus adds that some say Heracles did not get the apples from Atlas at all, but killed the serpent and picked them himself. The exchange was famous long before Apollodorus: a metope from the temple of Zeus at Olympia, made in the fifth century BC, shows Heracles bearing the sky with Athena's help while Atlas holds out the apples.

Did Perseus turn Atlas to stone?

In Ovid, yes. Book 4 of the Metamorphoses makes Atlas a king of enormous size at the western edge of the world, owner of an orchard of trees with golden branches and golden fruit. The goddess Themis had warned him that a son of Jupiter would one day steal his gold, so when Perseus arrives, introduces himself as Jupiter's son and asks for a night's shelter, Atlas drives him away.

Perseus turns away, holds up the head of Medusa, and Atlas becomes a mountain. His beard and hair become forests, his shoulders and hands become ridges, his head becomes the summit and his bones become stone. Then, Ovid says, the gods made him grow to an enormous size, so that the whole sky with all its stars rested on him.

Ovid does not name the son of Jupiter the prophecy meant, but readers have always taken it to be Heracles, who would later take the golden apples. Atlas feared the wrong son.

Are the Atlas Mountains and the Atlantic named after Atlas?

Yes. The Greeks gave the Titan's name to the mountains of north-west Africa, the region they called Libya. Herodotus describes Mount Atlas as narrow and round, and so high, it is said, that its peaks are never seen, because clouds never leave them, and says the local people called it the pillar of heaven. He also names the sea beyond the Pillars of Heracles the Atlantic, the sea of Atlas.

Virgil's Aeneid keeps the Titan and the mountain together: when Mercury flies down to Atlas, the mountain that props up the sky, the peak has a head crowned with pines and wrapped in cloud, and snow lies on its shoulders.

One trap: the Atlas of Plato's Critias is not the Titan. Plato makes him the eldest son of Poseidon and the first king of Atlantis, and says the island and its sea were named after him. Plato credits the Atlantis story to Solon and Egyptian priests, but no earlier source tells it, and the two figures should not be merged.

Who are the daughters of Atlas?

Atlas fathered some of the most familiar names in the night sky.

Ovid's Fasti explains why only six Pleiades are easy to see: either because Merope married a mortal, Sisyphus, and hides in shame, or because Electra covered her face so she would not see Troy fall. Hesiod's Works and Days already calls the star cluster the Atlas-born Pleiades.

In the sources

Atlas appears in Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days, Homer's Odyssey, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, Herodotus' Histories, Plato's Critias (a different Atlas), the Library of Apollodorus, Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Fasti, and the Fabulae attributed to Hyginus. Pausanias describes the Heracles and Atlas scene in the art at Olympia.

The sources disagree on several points:

• What does he hold? In Hesiod, the sky itself, on his head and hands. In the Odyssey, the pillars that keep earth and sky apart. In Aeschylus, a pillar of heaven and earth on his shoulders.
• Who is his mother? Clymene, a daughter of Oceanus, in Hesiod; Asia in Apollodorus.
• Why does he bear the sky? Hesiod says only that Zeus assigned it. Hyginus says he led the Titans and was punished.
• Whose daughter is Calypso? Homer makes her the daughter of Atlas. Hesiod's Theogony lists a Calypso among the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys.
• Titan or mountain? In Apollodorus, Atlas still holds the sky when Heracles comes for the apples. In Ovid, Perseus, Heracles' great-grandfather, has already turned him to stone, and the mountain carries the heavens.

In popular culture

• The atlas of maps. The word for a book of maps comes from Atlas. Gerardus Mercator used it for his collection of maps in the 1590s, explaining it by a legendary King Atlas of Mauretania, a learned astronomer, rather than the Titan.
• Rockefeller Center. The bronze Atlas by Lee Lawrie and Rene Chambellan (1937) on Fifth Avenue carries an armillary sphere, a model of the heavens, again not the earth.
• Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand's 1957 novel uses the Titan as a metaphor for people who carry the world. The title is modern; no myth has Atlas shrug off his burden.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians. In Rick Riordan's The Titan's Curse, Atlas is the Titans' general and Percy briefly takes the sky. The general role echoes Hyginus; the rest is modern fiction.

Keep exploring

Atlas belongs to a family of rebels and survivors. Meet his brother in Prometheus in Greek mythology, the whole older generation in the Titans, and the war they lost in Who Was Zeus? Find him among the sons of Iapetus on the Greek gods family tree, or test yourself with the Greek mythology quiz.