- Looks after
- The one who carries the sky
- Roman name
- Atlas
- Often shown with
- The sky or the celestial globe on his shoulders.
Atlas
Ἄτλας
Atlas is a Titan condemned by Zeus to hold up the sky at the western edge of the world.
Atlas was the son of the Titan Iapetus and, in Hesiod, of Clymene. After the Titans lost their war with Zeus, he was given a particular punishment: to stand at the edge of the earth, near the Hesperides, and hold up the broad sky on his head and tireless arms.
Atlas appears in the story of Heracles' eleventh labour. Heracles needs the golden apples of the Hesperides, who in some versions are Atlas's daughters. In one tale, Heracles takes the sky for a time while Atlas gets the apples, and then Atlas tries not to take it back.
Later poets, among them Ovid, turned him into the Atlas mountains in north Africa, with the story of Perseus showing him the Gorgon's head. His daughters include the Pleiades, the seven sisters who became the star cluster.
In later art and language
Mercator used the name for his collection of maps, published in 1595, and atlas now means any such book. The first vertebra of the neck, which holds up the skull, is also called the atlas.
Ancient sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 507-520
- Apollodorus, Library 2.5.11
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.627-662