For at least the last seventy years, the United States has been the world’s Atlas, holding it up. The Pentagon aims to take some of the burden off of us with some major changes.

The Mythology

Atlas and his brother Menoetius sided with the Titans in their war against the Olympians, the Titanomachy. When the Titans were defeated, many of them (including Menoetius) were confined to Tartarus, but Zeus condemned Atlas to stand at the western edge of the earth and hold up the sky on his shoulders.[13] Thus, he was Atlas Telamon, “enduring Atlas”, and became a doublet of Coeus, the embodiment of the celestial axis around which the heavens revolve.[14]

A common misconception today is that Atlas was forced to hold the Earth on his shoulders, but Classical art shows Atlas holding the celestial spheres, not the terrestrial globe; the solidity of the marble globe borne by the Farnese Atlas may have aided the conflation, reinforced in the 16th century by the developing usage of atlas to describe a corpus of terrestrial maps.