"The god whose liquid arms are hurled
Around the globe, whose earthquakes rock the world."
Mythology tells us that when the Titans were defeated by Saturn they retreated into the interior of Spain; Jupiter followed them up, and beat them for the last time near Tartessus, and thus terminated a ten-years' war. Here we have a real battle on an actual battle-field.
If we needed any further proof that the empire of the Titans was the empire of Atlantis, we would find it in the names of the Titans: among these were Oceanus, Saturn or Chronos, and Atlas; they were all the sons of Uranos. Oceanus was at the base of the Greek mythology. Plato says ("Dialogues," Timæus, vol. ii., p. 533): "Oceanus and Tethys were the children of Earth and Heaven, and from these sprung Phorcys, and Chronos, and Rhea, and many more with them; and from Chronos and Rhea sprung Zeus and Hera, and all those whom we know as their brethren, and others who were their children." In other words, all their gods came out of the ocean; they were rulers over some ocean realm; Chronos was the son of Oceanus, and Chronos was an Atlantean god, and from him the Atlantic Ocean was called by the ancients "the Chronian Sea." The elder Minos was called "the Son of the Ocean:" he first gave civilization to the Cretans; he engraved his laws on brass, precisely as Plato tells us the laws of Atlantis were engraved on pillars of brass.
The wanderings of Ulysses, as detailed in the "Odyssey" of Homer, are strangely connected with the Atlantic Ocean. The islands of the Phoenicians were apparently in mid-ocean:
We dwell apart, afar
Within the unmeasured deep, amid its waves
The most remote of men; no other race
Hath commerce with us.—Odyssey, book vi.
The description of the Phæacian walls, harbors, cities, palaces, ships, etc., seems like a recollection of Atlantis. The island of Calypso appears also to have been in the Atlantic Ocean, twenty days' sail from the Phæacian isles; and when Ulysses goes to the land of Pluto, "the under-world," the home of the dead, he
"Reached the far confines of Oceanus,"
beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It would be curious to inquire how far the poems of Homer are Atlantean in their relations and inspiration. Ulysses's wanderings were a prolonged struggle with Poseidon, the founder and god of Atlantis.
"The Hekatoncheires, or Cetimæni, beings each with a hundred hands, were three in number—Kottos, Gyges or Gyes, and Briareus—and represented the frightful crashing of waves, and its resemblance to the convulsions of earthquakes." (Murray's "Mythology," p. 26.) Are not these hundred arms the oars of the galleys, and the frightful crashing of the waves their movements in the water?
"The Kyklopes also were three in number—Brontes, with his thunder; Steropes, with his lightning; and Arges, with his stream of light. They were represented as having only one eye, which was placed at the juncture between the nose and brow. It was, however, a large, flashing eye, as became beings who were personifications of the storm-cloud, with its flashes of destructive lightning and peals of thunder."