Koios

The account

Koios is a Titan with almost no surviving content. He appears in Hesiod's list of Ouranos's children, he lies with his sister Phoibe, and they produce Leto and Asteria — which makes him the grandfather of Apollo, Artemis and Hekate, three figures of considerable weight, by way of a Titan nobody has a story about. Ancient etymologists connected his name to the verb for asking or inquiring, and Roman writers rendered him as Polus, the axis of the sky. Both are guesses. He goes into Tartaros with the rest of the Titans after the war, and Hyginus reports a later tradition in which he breaks his chains and tries to escape and is driven back by Kerberos. His interest is structural: two of the most active Olympians descend from a Titan line that is otherwise entirely silent, which is a useful reminder that the genealogy was assembled out of local traditions that had to be reconciled with each other.