Titanomachy

The Titanomachy, also called the Great War and remembered as the Ancient War, was the long and ruinous conflict between the Titans led by Cronos and the Olympians led by Zeus, waged for mastery of Greece and all mortals. It ended in victory for the young gods and the imprisonment of the elder powers, and from its devastation the mortal world itself was forged.

The prophecy and the hidden child#

The Sisters of Fate had deemed that the mighty king of the Titans, Cronos, would one day be overthrown by his children, just as he had raised his hand against his own sire Ouranos and deposed him. To stop the prophecy, Cronos first sought to win the Sisters with the Steeds of Time, but they took the gift and refused to change his fate. He then began to swallow his children one by one at birth. His wife Rhea, unable to bear another loss, summoned an eagle to carry the newborn Zeus to Gaia to be raised, and gave Cronos a stone wrapped in cloth, which he foolishly swallowed in the child's place.

The war of two generations#

Raised in secret by Gaia, who nurtured his desire to free his siblings, Zeus grew with the intent not only to free his brothers and sisters but to defeat the Titans and seize his father's throne. When the time came, he freed his now full-grown siblings and declared war upon the Titans, who saw the young gods' hunger to rule over mortals as intolerable. Among the Titans who joined the war were Gaia, Cronos, Oceanus, Hyperion, Iapetus, Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Perses, alongside many unnamed others loyal to Cronos. Against them stood Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Demeter, and Hestia, joined as the war dragged on by newborn gods such as the swift Hermes and the twin archers Artemis and Apollo. Two younger Titans, Prometheus and Helios, betrayed their kin to side with the Olympians.

The tide turned when Zeus rescued the Elder Cyclopes and the Hecatonchires from Tartarus. The Cyclopes forged the great weapons of the brothers, Zeus' thunderbolts, Poseidon's trident, and Hades' soul-stealing claws, while the Hecatonchires lent their unnatural strength. The Titans wielded mighty arms of their own, such as the Atlas Hammer and Hyperion's Spear, but these could not match the work of the Cyclopes and the smith god Hephaestus. The war raged for centuries, tearing apart continents and engulfing Greece in flame, and the Sisters of Fate at last decreed its end in favor of Zeus and the gods, as it had always been foretold. So destructive was the struggle that the mortal world itself was forged from it.

The fate of the Titans#

As the war closed, Atlas was captured through the combined efforts of Hades and Poseidon, while Zeus forged a terrible weapon from the heavens and the earth, the Blade of Olympus, and used its power to banish most of the Titans into Tartarus for eternity. Some were spared imprisonment only to suffer worse: Cronos was cursed to wander the Desert of Lost Souls with Pandora's Temple chained to his back; Prometheus was stripped of immortality and chained to have his liver devoured each day by an eagle for giving fire to mortals; and Gaia was stripped of her physical form, left as spirit within the Earth. Oceanus, diminished and stripped of his rulership, seems to have evaded Tartarus and retreated into the deepest waters.

The brothers then divided the world among themselves: Zeus took the heavens and became king of the gods, Poseidon became ruler of the seas, and Hades became lord of the Underworld, forever keeping watch over the imprisoned enemies of the gods. The war had not been without cost, for evils had been born in its aftermath, and Zeus sealed them within Pandora's Box, where Athena hid the power of Hope to counter them. Gaia, ever within the Earth, schemed to restore the Titans, and the strife she sowed would one day rise again in the Second Titanomachy, when the Ghost of Sparta turned the Titans against Olympus.