The Curious Story of Hyperion

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Who is Hyperion? This is actually a harder question to answer than it might first appear. The name is familiar enough from classical mythology. Say it out loud, right now: it has that ring of familiarity, doesn’t it? Say it again, go on.

Oh dear. If you said it the way I’d been saying it, then – according to classical purists – you (and I) just said it wrong.

But we’ll get to that. Let’s clear up who Hyperion is, or was, first. But even that is harder to clear up than you might think.

For a start, in Greek mythology there were two Hyperions – or three, depending on how you view it. And whichever of the two (or three) we’re referring to, we’re probably pronouncing his name wrong, as I said.

In Greek mythology, Hyperion referred to two very different characters. The more famous of the two was Hyperion, one of the Titans. He was the father of Helios, Selene and Eos by his sister-wife Theia. Helios was the god of the sun, Selene the goddess of the moon, and Eos the goddess of the dawn.

In his Theogony, Hesiod tells us: ‘And Theia was subject in love to Hyperion and bare great Helius (Sun) and clear Selene (Moon) and Eos (Dawn) who shines upon all that are on earth and upon the deathless Gods who live in the wide heaven.’

Hesiod ought to know about these things. As the author of the Theogony (describing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods) and of the Works and Days (a didactic hodgepodge of wisdom and myth, including the story of Pandora’s ‘box’), Hesiod was in his own way as influential and authoritative as his near-contemporary, Homer. He is even thought to have come up with the names for the Nine Muses.

But even Hesiod only tells us about one of the two (or three) Hyperions. For then there’s the other Hyperion, a Trojan prince who was one of the sons of King Priam of Troy. Everyone who knows the story of the Trojan War can name two of Priam’s sons, Hector and Paris; but who can name Hyperion as among his offspring? We don’t even know who the mother of this Hyperion was.

But then we come to the third Hyperion, which is not a person so much as it is a personification of the sun. For ‘Hyperion’ is also a byname of the sun, Helios. However, technically Hyperion was the father of the sun rather than the sun itself, but the error (probably) began with Homer, who identified Hyperion with the sun directly.

We’ve all been pronouncing Hyperion incorrectly, by the way – and it’s all Shakespeare’s fault.

In Hamlet, in the title-character’s famous soliloquy from Act 1 Scene 2 (‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt …’), Hamlet likens his uncle, Claudius, unfavourably to his deceased father:

So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother …

As Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor note in the Arden Edition of the play (Third Edition), glossing the line above, it is largely because of Hamlet that the pronunciation of ‘Hyperion’ has shifted to ‘high-PEER-ee-on’ from the earlier (and more correct) ‘hipper-EYE-on’ or ‘highper-EYE-on’, with the main stress falling on the third syllable.

But Shakespeare’s metre makes it obvious here that he was intending ‘Hyperion’ to be pronounced with the main emphasis on the second syllable, and a later use of the name – in Act 3 Scene 4 – confirms this, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude with the differences between her late husband and her new one:

Look here upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers:
See what a grace was seated on this brow,
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself …

By the time John Keats (1795-1821), such an admirer of Shakespeare, came to embark upon his abandoned epic poem Hyperion (about the Titan, rather than the Trojan prince), the Shakespearean pronunciation had taken hold, as this line shows:

O tender spouse of gold Hyperion …

But as the other appearances of the titan’s name in the poem suggestion, Keats wanted us to elide ‘Hyperion’ from a four-syllable name into a three-syllable one: ‘high-PEER-yen’.