Phoebe is a first-generation Titaness, daughter of Uranos and Gaia, whose Greek name means bright or radiant. With her brother and husband Coeus she is the mother of Leto and Asteria, and so the grandmother of two great powers of light and darkness: Apollo and Artemis through Leto, and Hecate through Asteria. Her particular association is with prophecy.
In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the priestess who opens the play recites the descent of the Delphic oracle and names Phoebe as one of its early holders, a Titaness who received the oracular seat and later gave it as a birthday gift to her grandson Apollo, from whom, the tradition holds, he took the title Phoebus. Later writers also linked her, through her radiant name, with the moon. Like the other archaic Titans she has no living cult; her role is to bridge the older powers and the Olympian gods of light who succeed them.
Beyond her role at Delphi, Phoebe's afterlife is almost entirely genealogical: later mythographers repeat her descent to Leto and Asteria with little elaboration, and no cult or festival in her own name is attested anywhere in the Greek world. Her name lived on chiefly through her grandson: Phoebus, an epithet of Apollo meaning bright or radiant, is generally read by ancient and modern scholars alike as inherited, at least in poetic memory, from this grandmother of light, even where no ancient source spells out the transmission in so many words.