The theological poets thought that the first heaven was no higher than the mountain heights, where Jupiter’s thunderbolts had stayed the giants from their brutish wandering. This is the Heaven which reigned on earth and which began to confer great benefits on mankind. They clearly thought that the heavens where the mountain peaks. [ . . . ] In precisely this way, children imagine that mountains are columns supporting the upper storey of the heavens [ . . . ] It was from such a roof on Olympus, as Thetis tells Achilles in Homer, that Jupiter and the other gods went to feast on Mt Atlas. Hence, we must regard as post-Homeric the passage in the Odyssey, in which the Titans war against heaven by piling up high mountains – Ossa on Pelion and Olympus on Ossa – in order to climb up and expel the gods. For everywhere in the Iliad, Homer clearly describes the gods as residing on top of Mt Olympus, so that the collapse of Olympus alone would have sufficed to cause the gods’ downfall. Even in the later epic, the Odyssey, the myth of the Titans seems inappropriate: for in that poem, the underworld in which Ulysses sees and speaks with deceased heroes is no deeper than a ditch.