Topic > The Greek god Uranus

The influence of the philosophers, Cicero, in De Natura Deorum ("Concerning the Nature of the Gods"), states that he was the descendant of the ancient gods Ether and Emera, Air and Day. According to the Orphic hymns, Uranus was the son of Nyx, the personification of night. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay on the creation myth of Olympus, as Hesiod tells in Theogony, Uranus came every night to cover the earth and mate with Gaia, but he hated the children she bore him. Hesiod named their first six sons and six daughters Titans, the three hundred-armed giants Hecatonchires, and the one-eyed giants Cyclopes. Uranus imprisoned Gaia's youngest children in Tartarus, deep within the Earth, where they caused Gaia pain. . He fashioned a great sickle from a flint blade and asked his sons to castrate Uranus. Only Kronos, the youngest and most ambitious of the Titans, was willing: he ambushed his father and castrated him, throwing his severed testicles into the sea. For this fearful act, Uranus named his children Titanes Theoi, or "Gods of Tension." From the blood shed by Uranus on Earth were born the Giants, the Erinyes (the avenging Erinyes), the Melie (the ash tree nymphs) and, according to some, the Telchines. Aphrodite emerged from her genitals into the sea. The learned Alexandrian poet Callimachus reported that the bloody sickle had been buried in the earth at Zancle in Sicily, but the romanized Greek traveler Pausanias was informed that the sickle had been thrown into the sea from the promontory near Bolina, not far from Argyra on the coast of Achaia, while the historian Timaeus located the sickle in Corcyra; The Corcyrans claimed to be descendants of the legendary Phaeacia visited by Odysseus, and around 500 BC a Greek mythographer, Acusilaus, claimed that the Phaeacians were born from the very blood of the castration of Uranus. After Uranus was deposed, Cronus was once again imprisoned by the Hecatonchires and the Cyclopes in Tartarus. Uranus and Gaia then prophesied that Cronus in turn was destined to be overthrown by his own son, and so the Titan attempted to avoid this fate by devouring his young. Zeus, through the deception of his mother Rhea, avoided this fate. These ancient myths of distant origins found no expression in the cults among the Hellenes. Uranus' function was that of the defeated god of an ancient time, before real time began. After his castration, Heaven no longer came to cover the Earth at night, but retained its place, and "the original generation came to an end." " (KerŽnyi). Uranus was hardly considered anthropomorphic, apart from the genitals in the castration myth. It was simply the sky, which Uranus, the primordial Greek god, personified the sky. Its equivalent in Roman mythology was Caelus. In ancient Greek literature , Uranus or Father Sky was the son and husband of Gaia, Mother Earth. According to Hesiod's Theogony, Uranus was conceived by Gaia alone, but other sources cite Aether as his father and Uranus were the parents of the first generation Titans and the ancestors of most Greek gods, but no cult directly addressing Uranus survived into classical times, and Uranus does not appear among the usual themes of Greek painted pottery. The elements Earth, Sky and Styx could however be united in a solemn invocation in the Homeric epic. Keep in mind: this is just one example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Most Greeks considered Uranus to be primordial, and gave him no parent, believing that he was. born from Chaos, the primordial form of the universe. However, in Theogony, Hesiod states that Uranus is the descendant of Gaia, the earth goddess. Alcmane and Callimachus hypothesize that Uranus was generated by Aether, the god).