Iapetus
Father of Mankind
eye-AP-ih-tus
The Titan whose sons drew the line between gods and mortals, Prometheus, Atlas, and Epimetheus are all his.
Domains
MortalityCraftThe Western Axis
Symbols
Western PillarSpearClay
The Story
Iapetus held the western pillar and, with his brothers, pinned the sky while Cronus struck. His significance is almost entirely in his children by the Oceanid Clymene, who between them define the human condition.
Prometheus steals fire and is chained to a rock; Atlas is sentenced to hold up the heavens; Epimetheus accepts Pandora and lets loose everything in her jar; Menoetius is blasted into Erebus for sheer arrogance. The Greeks took his name as a byword for mortal shortsightedness, and some traditions make him the direct ancestor of the human race.
Did You Know?
- Saturn's moon Iapetus has one hemisphere as dark as asphalt and one as bright as snow, an oddity noticed in 1671, when Cassini could only see it on one side of its orbit.
- Some scholars have compared his name to Japheth, one of Noah's sons, on the grounds that both are the ancestor of a branch of humanity. The link is old and unproven.
- Greek writers used his name as shorthand for the kind of foolishness that gets you punished, calling someone a son of Iapetus was an insult.