Atlas

Account

Atlas was a Titan, son of Iapetus and the Oceanid Clymene (or Asia), brother to Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Menoetius. When the Titans made war on the Olympians, Atlas led forces in the west. Defeat brought a punishment fitted to cosmic scale: Zeus set him at the edge of the world to bear the heavens on his shoulders - not the globe of earth that later sculptors placed in his arms, but the vault of the sky itself, so that it would never again fall upon the gods' new order.