Tityos

[2] Tityos grew so large that he split his mother's womb, and he was carried to term by Gaia, the Earth.

[4] Ironically, Jusepe de Ribera's painting depicts a vulture feeding on the left side of Tityos' body, contradictory to the anatomical location of the liver.

Jane Ellen Harrison noted that, "To the orthodox worshiper of the Olympians he was the vilest of criminals; as such Homer knew him": I saw Tityus too, son of the mighty Goddess Earth—sprawling there on the ground, spread over nine acres—two vultures hunched on either side of him, digging into his liver, beaking deep in the blood-sac, and he with his frantic hands could never beat them off, for he had once dragged off the famous consort of Zeus in all her glory, Leto, threading her way toward Pytho's ridge over the lovely dancing-rings of Panopeus".

The poet Lucretius restyles the figure of Tityos in book III (lines 978–998) of De rerum natura, a demythologized Tityos who is not in the underworld, eternally punished, but here and now, "the prototypical anguished lover", plagued by winged creatures that are not vultures, as E. J. Kenney argues[9] but cupids.

Virgil responds to Lucretius with a retrospective simile of Tityos in the Aeneid (6.595ff), which compares his torment of desire with the unrest of Dido, whose flame of love is eating her marrow.