Zeus slept with Elara, but afterwards he hid her from his wife,
Hera, by placing her deep beneath the earth, afraid of Hera's reaction. Tityos grew so large that he split his mother's womb, and he was carried to term by
Gaia, the Earth. Once grown, Tityos attempted to rape
Leto at the behest of Hera. He was slain by Leto's protective children
Artemis and
Apollo. In some accounts, Tityus was instead slain by the thunderbolt of his father Zeus. As punishment, he was stretched out in
Tartarus and tortured by two
vultures who fed on his liver, which
grew back every night. he was reminded by the local people that it was the abode of Tityos and recalled the fact that the
Phaeacians had carried
Rhadamanthus in their boats to visit Tityos, according to Homer. There on
Euboea at the time of Strabo they were still showing a "cave called Elarion from Elara who was mother to Tityos, and a hero-shrine of Tityos, and some kind of honours are mentioned which are paid him." It is clear that the local hero-cult had been superseded by the cult of the
Olympian gods, an Olympian father provided, and the hero demonized. A comparable giant
chthonic pre-Olympian of a
Titan-like order is
Orion. The poet
Lucretius, in
De rerum natura (Book III, lines 978–998), provides a demythologized Tityos who is "the prototypical anguished lover," eternally punished not in the underworld, but here and now, by a plague not of vultures but of cupids.
Virgil briefly depicts Tityos' torments in Book VI of his
Aeneid. Hamilton (1993) suggests that Virgil's description of Tityos' agony and unrest contains a "verbal echo" of the lovesick
Dido's unrest in Book IV, indicating that Virgil's Tityos, while "remythologized," remains indebted to Lucretius's. Among Roman writers,
Horace and
Claudian follow Virgil in depicting a singular vulture;
Ovid and
Seneca vary from work to work;
Propertius and
Statius depict more than one vulture. ==Postclassical references==