The Titan Struck Down for Insolence

Menoetius is a second-generation Titan, son of Iapetus and brother of Atlas, Prometheus and Epimetheus, and he is the god of violent rage and rash, ruinous action; his name suggests doomed might or ruined strength. He has almost no story beyond his punishment. In Hesiod's Theogony, for his overweening insolence, Zeus strikes him with a thunderbolt and hurls him down into Erebus, the darkness below the world. His fate is set beside the different punishments of his brothers, Atlas condemned to hold up the sky, Prometheus chained for the theft of fire, so that the sons of Iapetus together form a set of cautionary examples of overreaching against the new order of Zeus. Menoetius is the plainest of them: the Titan of reckless force who is simply blasted out of the way. The name was later borne by mortal figures in Greek myth, including the father of Achilles's companion Patroclus, but the Titan himself remains a figure of a single, exemplary downfall.