Italiano: Statua romana di Atlante (sec II d.C.). Già nella Collezione Farnese, oggi al Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Zeus condemned Atlas to stand at the western edge of Gaia (the Earth) and hold up Uranus (the Sky) on his shoulders, to prevent the two from resuming their primordial embrace.
(To the Ancient Greeks, “the western edge” of the earth would have been the Atlan-tic Ocean.)
So how is it the case that Atlas could have shrugged? Can than anyone condemned (justly or not) shrug their sentence? And how frustrating a sentence: The celestial sphere is forever spinning, preventing our Titanic friend from ever being able to get a grip.
Certainly, the well-read Ayn Rand (who majored in history and philosophy at the University of Leningrad) herself knew these details, but may have shrugged them off, assuming that the modern myth about a titan shouldering the earth would carry more weight with her readers.
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