Hyperion

Hyperion is one of the twelve Titans of the first generation, children of Uranos the Sky and Gaia the Earth, and among the least storied of them in his own right; his importance is above all as a father. His name was understood by the Greeks to mean something like the one who goes above or he who watches from on high, marking him as a lord of heavenly light.

With his sister and wife Theia, herself a Titaness of light and sight, he brought forth the three great luminaries of Greek myth: Helios the Sun, Selene the Moon, and Eos the Dawn. In this way the first personified light of the Titan generation gives rise to the actual lights of the sky worshipped by later Greeks. Hyperion has no developed cult or mythology of his own, Homer sometimes even uses Hyperion as another name for the Sun directly, and he belongs to the archaic scaffolding of the cosmos that the Theogony sets in order before the Olympians come to power.

Hyperion's afterlife in English literature and, more recently, in botany, has given the obscure Titan a prominence in modern culture his own thin ancient mythology never provided. The Romantic poet John Keats began an ambitious epic, Hyperion, in 1818, reworking the Titan's fall to the young sun god Apollo as an extended meditation on the passing of one order of beauty and power to a new, more advanced one, a poem Keats left unfinished and later returned to in a second, differently structured attempt, The Fall of Hyperion: A Vision, also incomplete at his death in 1821; both fragments are counted among the major achievements of English Romantic poetry despite, or partly because of, their unfinished state, and they did more than any ancient source to fix Hyperion in later readers' minds as a figure of dignified, doomed transition rather than a mere genealogical placeholder in Hesiod's list.

In a considerably more literal vein, the name resurfaced in 2006 when researchers in Redwood National Park in California identified and measured a coast redwood, since named Hyperion, standing at just under 380 feet, about 379 feet by the precise tape-drop measurement taken shortly after its discovery, the tallest known living tree on Earth at the time of its discovery, its exact location kept undisclosed by park authorities to protect it from damage by visitors. Neither the Romantic poem nor the towering tree has any documented connection to actual ancient cult, since Hyperion himself never had one, but together they show how a Titan remembered mainly as a name in a divine genealogy could still supply, many centuries later, a fitting label for both a meditation on decline and a living record holder for sheer height.