Tityos was a gigantic earth-born son of Zeus who attempted to violate the goddess Leto and was struck down for his crime — condemned to one of the most famous eternal punishments in the underworld, his ever-regrowing liver torn out forever by vultures. He stands beside Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion as one of the great sinners whose torments fill the Greek vision of Hades.
The Giant Son of the Earth
Tityos was a giant of enormous size, said to be a son of Zeus by a mortal woman, Elara — whom Zeus, fearing Hera's jealousy, hid beneath the earth, so that their son was born from the ground itself and reckoned an earth-born giant. When he grew, he covered, by some accounts, nine acres of ground when stretched out, a being of monstrous bulk.
The Crime Against Leto
Tityos's doom came when, incited by the ever-jealous Hera, he attempted to rape the Titaness Leto — the mother of Apollo and Artemis — as she traveled to the sacred site of Delphi. But Leto's divine children rushed to her defense, and the twin archer-gods Apollo and Artemis slew the giant with a hail of arrows. To assault the mother of two great gods was among the gravest of crimes, and the punishment was correspondingly eternal.
The Eternal Torment
Cast down into Tartarus, Tityos was stretched out across the ground and bound, and there two vultures (or serpents) were set to feast forever upon his liver — the organ the ancients believed to be the seat of the passions and desires. Each day the birds tore out the liver; each night it grew whole again, so that the torment could never end. His was a punishment fitted to his crime: the giant whose lust had assailed a goddess had that very seat of lust devoured for all eternity. Both Odysseus and Aeneas were said to glimpse him in the underworld, the vast giant pinned and gnawed forever.
The Sinner of the Underworld
Tityos endures as one of the archetypal damned of Greek myth — his unending, self-renewing torment a vivid emblem of divine justice and of appetite punished by appetite. He embodies the Greek conviction that the gravest crimes against the gods earn not death, which ends, but an eternity of suffering that renews itself forever, the liver torn out each day only to grow again for tomorrow's agony.
The giant's lust assailed a goddess once; for that, his liver is torn out and regrown, every day, forever.