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Divine Lineage
Ὑ

Sun

Hyperion

ὙπερίωνRoman: Hyperion

Father of the sun, the moon and the dawn, and almost nothing else.

1
epithet
0
cult sites
3
offspring
1
union
1
recorded birth

Vitals

Kind
Titan
Generation
1
Domains
light, the one who goes above
Accent
Sun — daylight, the dawn, far-shooting brightness
Sacred symbols
the light before sunrise
Principal cult sites
No cult attested

What they were called

  • Ὑπερίων

    he who travels above

Lineage

See in the tree

Offspring in this roster

ChildEosChildHeliosChildSelene

Notable myths

  1. The Three Lights

    Theia bore great Helios, bright Selene and Eos who shines on everyone, having yielded in love to Hyperion. Hesiod gives the union two lines and moves on. Those two lines account for daylight, moonlight and the dawn, which is more of the observable world than most of the poem's longer episodes cover.

    Hesiod, Theogony 371-374

The account

Hyperion is a Titan of light who is almost entirely defined by his children. With his sister Theia he fathers Helios, Selene and Eos — sun, moon and dawn — which makes his union the single most consequential one in the Titan generation for anybody who has to tell the time. He himself does nothing in the surviving myths. He has no scene, no quarrel and no cult that we can identify with confidence. The name means something like 'the one who goes above', and Homer uses it so often as an epithet of Helios that in several passages it is impossible to tell whether father and son are being distinguished at all; the Odyssey speaks of Hyperion Helios as one figure. That collapse is characteristic of the Titan generation. They are the powers whose functions were later taken over, cleanly and completely, by their own descendants.

Ancient sources

  • Hesiod, Theogony 132-138
  • Hesiod, Theogony 371-374

Where a line reference is not given, the work is cited without one rather than guessed at.

Image credit

No classical portrait of this figure survives, so the mark on this page is generated from their Greek initial and their domain accent rather than taken from an artwork.