Titanomachy
In Greek mythology, the Titanomachy, or War of the Titans was the ten-year series of battles fought in Thessaly between the two camps of deities long before the existence of mankind: the Titans, based on Mount Othrys and the Olympians, who would come to reign on Mount Olympus. This Titanomachia is also known as the Battle of the Titans, Battle of Gods, or just The Titan War.
Greeks of the Classical age knew of several poems about the war between the gods and many of the Titans. The dominant one, and the only one that has survived, is the Theogony attributed to Hesiod. A lost epic, Titanomachia, attributed to the blind Thracian bard Thamyris, himself a legendary figure, was mentioned in passing in an essay On Music that was once attributed to Plutarch. The Titans also played a prominent role in the poems attributed to Orpheus. Although only scraps of the Orphic narratives survive, they show interesting differences from the Hesiodic tradition.
These Greek stories of the Titanomachy fall into a class of similar myths throughout Europe and the Near East, where one generation or group of gods by and large opposes the dominant one. Sometimes the Elder Gods are supplanted. Sometimes the rebels lose, and are either cast out of power entirely or incorporated into the pantheon. Other examples might include the wars of the with the Vanir and Jotuns in Scandinavian mythology, the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, the Hittite "Kingship in Heaven" Kumarbi narrative, the struggle between the Tuatha D� Danann and the Fomorians in gaelic mythology, and the obscure generational conflict in Ugaritic fragments.
A lost Titanomachy that dealt with the struggle that Zeus and his siblings, the Olympian Gods, had in overthrowing their father Cronos and his divine generation, the Titans, was traditionally ascribed to Eumelus of Corinth, a semi-legendary bard of the Bacchiad ruling family in archaic Corinth, who was treasured as the traditional composer of the Prosodion, the processional anthem of Messenian independence that was performed on Delos.
Even in Antiquity many authors cited Titanomachia without an author's name. M.L. West in analyzing the evidence concludes that the name of Eumelos was attached to the poem as the only name available. From the very patchy evidence, it seems that "Eumelos"' account of the Titanomachy differed from the surviving account of Hesiod's Theogony at salient points. The eighth century BCE date for the poem is not possible; M.L. West ascribes a late seventh-century date as the earliest.
The Titanomachy was divided into two books. The battle of Olympians and Titans was preceded by some sort of theogony, or genealogy of the Primeval Gods, in which, the Byzantine writer Lydus remarked, the author of Titanomachy placed the birth of Zeus, not in Crete, but in Lydia, which should signify on Mount Sipylus.
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