Atlas (King)

This article is about the mythical Atlas interpreted as a ruler. For other meanings of Atlas see Atlas (disambiguation)

Late Hellenistic and Roman poets reimagined the Titan Atlas as a giant ruler in the westernmost lands, and early modern translators such as Thomas Bulfinch made of that hint a King Atlas, a mythical King of Mauretania, west of Libya, who provided an alternative etiological origin-tale for the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. The hints in literary myth-makers' poetical license are to be found in a lost poem of Polyidus,Polyidos' lost dithyramb apparently made Atlas not a king but a shepherd who blocked Perseus' way and was turned to stone. known from a brief quote in Etymologicum Magnum and Ovid's Metamorphoses (iv.627ff), this "Atlas Iapetionides surpassed all men in giant size. He ruled the world's last lands" (Metamorphoses, iv). Perseus encountered him in his wanderings after he killed the Gorgon; the niggardly hospitality of Atlas so outraged Perseus that he shewed the face of the Gorgon, turning Atlas into a rocky mountain. Later, that range of mountains would be named after him.

Ovid's sense of Atlas is as a giant and the son of Iapetus ("Atlas Iapionides"), no other than the original Titan Atlas; Atlas and the many pillars (mountains) he used to hold up the sky were reputed to be beyond the western horizons, where Atlas stood in the sea up to his knees—"iron Atlas stands in Oceanos, the wave swelling and breaking on his knees" (Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica v.408)— but eventually the Atlas mountain range was settled on as the correct location.

It was this Atlas that Gerardus Mercator was paying tribute to when he first used the name "Atlas" to describe a book of maps (see Atlas (cartography)). Mercator included a depiction of the King on the title-page of his publication of Atlas, Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes De Fabrica Mundi ... ("Atlas, or Description of the Universe") (Duisburg, 1585-1595), which was published posthumously.

Notes

References

*Hyginus, Poetic Astronomyii.12
*Apollonius Rhodius, iv.1513ff
*Bulfinch, Thomas, The Age of Fable , (1913), vol.1, ch XV "Perseus and Atlas". Thomas Bulfinch's anecdotal version based on Ovid synthesizes the Titan "ruler" of the Hesperides as a king.
*Atlas and Perseus

External links

*On the origin of the term "atlas" for a book of maps
*Article at Encyclopædia Britannica