Uranus (mythology) three one-hundred-handed giants the Hekatonkheires, and the one-eyed giants the Cyclopes. Uranus imprisoned Gaia's youngest children in Tartarus, deep within Earth, where they caused pain to Gaia. She shaped a great flint-bladed sickle and asked her sons to castrate Uranus. Only Cronus, youngest and most ambitious of the Titans, was willing: he ambushed his father and castrated him, casting the severed testicles into the sea. For this fearful deed, Uranus called his sons Titanes Theoi, or "Straining Gods." From the blood that spilled from Uranus onto the Earth came forth the Giants, the Erinyes (the avenging Furies), the Meliae (the
Uranus (mythology) standing on high' from PIE *"ṷérso-" (cf. Sanskrit "várṣman" 'height, top', Lithuanian "viršùs" 'upper, highest seat', Russian "verx" 'height, top'). Of some importance in the comparative study of Indo-European mythology is the identification by Georges Dumézil (1934) of Uranus with the Vedic deity "Váruṇa" (Mitanni "Aruna"), god of the sky and waters, but the etymological equation is considered untenable. In Hesiod's "Theogony," Uranus is the offspring of Gaia, the earth goddess. Alcman and Callimachus elaborate that Uranus was fathered by Aether, the god of heavenly light and the upper air. Under the influence of the philosophers, Cicero, in "De Natura