TitansGiants.

    The earliest generation of the gods, the first Titans were sons of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth). Named Oceanus, Coeiis, Hyperion, Crius, Iapetus, and Cronus, they coupled with their six sister Titans to produce the next generation of Titan/gods. Oceanus and Tethys produced the Oceanids; Coeüs and Phoebe had Asteria and Leto; Hyperion and Theia had Eos, Helios, and Selene; Crius and Eurybia had Astraeus, Pallas, and Perses; Iapetus and Asia (or Clymene) had Atlas, Prometheus, and Epimetheus; Cronus and Rhea had Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus.
    Cronus (Saturn) became ruler of the Titans after castrating his father, Uranus, but was warned that one of his own children would overthrow him. He therefore devoured each one at birth; only Zeus (Jupiter), the youngest, was saved by his mother, Rhea. When Zeus grew to manhood he forced Cronus to disgorge his brothers and sisters. These six Olympians then made war on Cronus and the other Titans.
    Oceanus, who had remained independent of Cronus, now helped Zeus to dethrone him; Prometheus, son of the Titan Iapetus, also gave support. The Olympians were further aided by the other sons of Uranus and Gaia, the Hecatoncheires (Cottus, Briareus, and Gyges, gigantic monsters with one hundred arms and fifty heads) and the Cyclopes (Arges, Brontes, and Steropes). After a prolonged batde (Greek, Titanomachia), in which the Titans fought from the top of Mount Othrys while the Olympians held Olympus, the Titans were defeated and imprisoned in Tartarus, where the Hecatoncheires guarded them. Zeus punished Atlas, who had led the Titans, by making him hold the sky upon his shoulders.
    The Giants (Greek, Gigantes), sprung from the blood of Uranus as it fell upon Gaia when the sky-god was castrated by Cronus, were said to be Gaia’s revenge for Zeus’s imprisonment of the Titans. Twenty-four in number, of monstrous size and nearly invincible strength, they had dragon tails and serpents for feet (or the bodies of serpents and the heads of men). Inspired by Gaia, the Giants waged war (Greek, Gigantomachia) against Olympus, hurling huge trees and boulders. Otus and Ephialtes piled Mount Pelion on Mount Ossa in their effort to scale heaven.
    Hera (Juno) prophesied that only a mortal wearing a lion’s skin and protected by a magical herb could defeat the Giants, who were of divine blood but could be slain by the combined effort of a god and a mortal. Heracles was that mortal, and with the help of the gods he slew many of the Giants. These included Alcyoneus, killed with the aid of Athena (Minerva), who had also helped Heracles to find the herb; Porphyrion, who attacked Hera but was struck by Zeus’s thunderbolt and dispatched by Heracles; and Ephialtes, who was shot in both eyes by arrows from Apollo and Heracles. Enceladus was crushed when Athena flung the island of Sicily at him; she also flayed Pallas, then used his skin as a shield. In some accounts, the defeated Giants were buried under Mount Aetna and other volcanoes.
     In classical literature, the term “giant” is sometimes used generically to denote gigantic man-creatures who are not necessarily the sons of Gaia out of Uranus’s blood. In the postclassical era, the battle of the Olympians and Titans has been confused and conflated with the battle of the Giants against the gods, although the two narratives are distinct in classical literature. In art, the confusion in part arises from the pictorial similarity between the Titans atop Mount Othrys being flung down into Tartarus and the Giants scaling Olympus and being hurled back to earth.