Page:The Music of the Spheres.djvu/35

 After establishing his sovereignty over the world and rescuing his brothers and sisters through the aid of a powerful potion, he called Neptune and Pluto into his presence and made Neptune God of the Sea, and Pluto God of the Underworld. These three deities were then armed with powerful weapons for Jupiter could hurl his thunderbolts and flash his lightnings, Pluto walk about in the security of a hat of darkness, and Neptune stir up the sea, or calm it, by means of a three-pronged spear. The Titans, now thoroughly cowed, were punished in various ways, some being imprisoned in the Pit of Darkness with their brothers, the sons of Uranus, while others were doomed to work without ceasing on servile tasks for the gods. Atlas, the tallest, was commanded to stand on the western extremity of the earth and bear the vault of heaven on his head and shoulders. His station was later said to be in the Atlas mountains in Africa. Aeschylus, an ancient writer, claims that the daughters of Atlas and their mother, the nymph Pleone, fled to the sky in sorrow when Atlas was forced to undergo this terrible punishment. The seven daughters, now styled the Pleiades, represent one of our most beautiful star groups.

Now when Mother Earth heard of the high-handed ways of her grandson, Jupiter, she decided that she would give him a much needed lesson, so gathering together the most terrible of the giants among Uranus' sons, she incited them to start another great war. This war lasted ten years, the giants proving so formidable that Jupiter summoned the one-eyed Cyclops and the hundred-handed sons of grandfather Uranus to come to his aid. The Hecatoncheires gave immediate assistance by flinging rocks with all their three-hundred hands at once while the Cyclops forged thunderbolts as fast as Jupiter could handle them. In the thick of this bombardment, which left debris and bowlders strewn all over Thessaly, the giants balanced Mount Pelion on the summit of Mount Ossa, which lay between Pelion and Olympus, in a