Where were the defeated Titans imprisoned?

The defeated Titans were imprisoned in Tartarus, the abyss beneath the world in Greek mythology.

Tartarus was more than a generic underworld. In Hesiod’s Theogony, it is a primordial cosmic region, as distant below Earth as the sky is above it. After Zeus and the Olympians defeated Cronus and his allies in the ten-year Titanomachy, many of the defeated Titans were confined there.

Tartarus is often confused with Hades, but the two are not identical. Hades is both the god of the dead and the realm where ordinary souls go after death; Tartarus is a deeper prison associated with extraordinary punishment. The Cyclopes and Hecatoncheires had earlier been imprisoned there by Uranus and Cronus before Zeus released them to help defeat the Titans.

Later Greek and Roman writers expanded Tartarus into a place of torment for notorious offenders. Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, describes elaborate punishments there, helping shape the later popular image of Tartarus as a mythological hell.