ATLAS  , in

Greek mythology, the " endurer," a son of the Titan Iapetus and Clymene (or Asia), brother of Prometheus . Homer, in the Odyssey (i . 52) speaks of him as " one who knows the depths of the whole sea, and keeps the tall pillars which hold heaven and earth asunder." In the first instance he seems to have been a marine creation . The pillars which he supported were thought to rest in the sea, immediately beyond the most western horizon . But as the Greeks' knowledge of the west increased, the name of Atlas was transferred to a hill in the north-west of Africa . Later, he was represented as a king of that district, rich in flocks and herds, and owner of the garden of the Hesperides, who was turned into a rocky mountain when Perseus, to punish him for his inhospitality, showed him the Gorgon's head (Ovid, Metam. iv . 627) . Finally, Atlas was explained as the name of a primitive astronomer, who was said to have made the first celestial globe (Diodorus iii . 6o) . He was the father of the Pleiades and Hyades; according to Homer, of Calypso . In works of art he is represented as carrying the heavens or the terrestrial globe . The Farnese statue of Atlas in the Naples museum is well known .

The plural

form ATLANTES is the classical term in architecture for the male sculptured figures supporting a superstructure as in the baths at Pompeii, and in the temple at Agrigentum in Sicily . In 18th-century architecture half-figures of men with strong muscular development were used to support balconies ',see CARYATIDES and TELAMONES) . A figure of Atlas supporting the heavens is often found as a frontispiece in early collections of maps, and is said to have been first thus used by Mercator . The name is hence applied to avolume of maps (see MAP), and similarly to a volume which contains a tabular conspectus of a subject, such as an atlas of ethnographical, subjects or anatomical plates . It is also used of a large size of drawing paper .