Coeus

KOIOS (Coeus) was one of the elder Titanes (Titans), sons of Ouranos (Uranus, Sky) and Gaia (Gaea, Earth). He and his brothers conspired against their father, laying an ambush for him as he descended to lie with Earth. Four of the siblings were posted at the corners of the world, where they seized hold of him and held him fast, while Kronos (Cronus) castrated him with a sickle.

In this myth the brothers apparently personified the great pillars which occur in near-Eastern cosmologies holding heaven and earth apart, or sometimes the whole cosmos aloft. Koios' alternate name, Polos ("of the northern pole"), suggests he was the Titan of the pillar of the north. His brothers Hyperion, Iapetos (Iapetus), and Krios (Crius), on the other hand, presided over the west, east, and south respectively. Koios, as god of the axis of heaven around which the constellations revolved, was probably also a god of heavenly oracles, just as his wife Phoibe (Phoebe) presided over the oracles of the axis of earth Delphi,--a role inherited by their grandson Apollon.

The Titanes were eventually deposed by Zeus and cast into the pit of Tartaros. Hesiod describes this as a void located beneath the foundations of all, where earth, sea and sky have their roots. Here the Titanes shift in cosmological terms from being holders of heaven to bearers of the entire cosmos. According to Pindar and Aeschylus (in his lost play Prometheus Unbound) the Titanes were eventually released from the pit through the clemency of Zeus.