In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Cronus, Cronos, or Kronos ( or ; ) was the leader and youngest of the Titans, the children of Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (Sky). Cronus castrated and overthrew his father and then ruled during the mythological Golden Age until he himself was overthrown by his son, Zeus, and imprisoned in Tartarus. An alternate genealogy is presented by Plato, who wrote that Cronus, Phorcys, and Rhea were the children of Oceanus and Tethys.See also Wikipedia article: Timaeus.
Cronus was usually depicted with a harpe, scythe, or sickle, which was the instrument he used to castrate and depose Uranus, his father. Cronus was likely originally a harvest god, which is why in many regions of Greece the month of the harvest was named Cronion after him.Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898), Cronus In Athens, on the twelfth day of the Attic month of Hekatombaion, a festival called Kronia was held in honour of Cronus to celebrate the harvest, suggesting that, as a result of his association with the virtuous Golden Age, Cronus continued to preside as a patron of the harvest. Cronus was also identified in classical antiquity with the Roman deity Saturn.
Mythology Rise to power In an ancient myth recorded by Hesiod's Theogony, Cronus envied the power of his father, Uranus, the ruler of the universe. Uranus drew the enmity of Cronus's mother, Gaia, when he hid the gigantic youngest children of Gaia, the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires and one-eyed Cyclopes, in Tartarus, so that they would not see the light. Gaia created a great stone sickle and gathered together Cronus and his brothers to persuade them to castrate Uranus.Hesiod, Theogony 154–66.
Only Cronus was willing to do the deed, so Gaia gave him the sickle and placed him in ambush.Hesiod, Theogony 167–206. When Uranus met with Gaia, Cronus attacked him with the sickle, castrating him and casting his testicles into the sea. From the blood that spilled out from Uranus and fell upon the earth, the Gigantes, Erinyes, and Meliae were produced. The testicles produced a white foam from which the goddess Aphrodite emerged. For this, Uranus threatened vengeance and called his sons TitenesΤιτῆνες; according to Hesiod meaning "straining ones," the source of the word "titan", but this etymology is disputed. for overstepping their boundaries and daring to commit such an act. After the deed was done, Cronus cast his sickle into the waves, and it was concealed under the island of Corfu, which had been noted since antiquity for its sickle-like shape, and gave it its ancient name, Drepane ("sickle").Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4.981-985
While Hesiod seems to imply Cronus never set them free to begin with, Pseudo-Apollodorus says that after dispatching Uranus, Cronus re-imprisoned the Hecatoncheires and the Cyclopes and set the dragon Campe to guard them.Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.1.5 He and his older sister Rhea took the throne of the world as king and queen. The period in which Cronus ruled was called the Golden Age, as the people of the time had no need for laws or rules; everyone did the right thing, and immorality was absent. In some authors, a different divine pair, Ophion and Eurynome, a daughter of Oceanus, were said to have ruled Mount Olympus in the early age of the Titans. Rhea fought Eurynome and Cronus fought Ophion, and after defeating them they threw them into the waves of the ocean, thus becoming rulers in their place.Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 503–507; Tripp, s.v. Ophion; Grimal, s.v. Ophion; Smith, s.v. Ophion.
King of Gods
After securing his place as the new king of gods, Cronus learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own children, just as he had overthrown his father. As a result, although he sired the gods Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon by Rhea, he devoured them all as soon as they were born to prevent the prophecy. When the sixth child, Zeus, was born, Rhea sought Gaia to devise a plan to save them and to eventually get retribution on Cronus for his acts against his father and children.
Rhea secretly gave birth to Zeus in Crete, and handed Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, also known as the Omphalos Stone, which he promptly swallowed, thinking that it was his son. According to De astronomia, when Rhea presented the swaddled rock to him, Cronus asked her to nurse the infant one last time before he swallowed him. Rhea pressed her breast against the rock, and the milk that was sprayed across the heavens created the Milky Way galaxy. Cronus then ate the rock.Hyginus Astronomica 2.43.1
Rhea kept Zeus hidden in a cave on Mount Ida, Crete. According to some versions of the story, he was then raised by a goat named Amalthea, while a company of Curetes, armored male dancers, shouted and clanged their shields and spears to make enough noise to mask the baby's cries from Cronus. In the Fabulae, Amalthea was a nymph who hid Zeus by placing him in a cradle in a tree, so that he was suspended between the earth, the sea, and the sky, all of which were ruled by his father, Cronus. Still other versions of the tale say that Zeus was raised by his grandmother, Gaia. One Cretan myth relates how Cronus once went to Crete himself, and Zeus, in order to hide from his father, transformed himself into a snake, and changed his nymph nurses, Helice and Cynosura, into bears, who later became the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.Scholia on the Odyssey 5.272. . In another myth, Cronus transformed the Curetes into lions, but Rhea made them her sacred animals and yoked them in her chariot.Oppian, The Chase 3.7
Overthrown According to Hesiod, once Zeus had grown up, Cronus was forced to regurgitate his children through Gaia's cunning and Zeus's might. Cronus disgorged first the stone that he had swallowed instead of Zeus, followed by Zeus's siblings. The stone was then placed by Zeus at Pytho on Mount Parnassus.Hesiod, Theogony 492-506.
In other versions of the tale, Metis gave Cronus an emetic to force him to disgorge the children.Apollodorus, 1.2.1.
After freeing his siblings, Zeus released the Hecatoncheires and the Cyclopes who gifted him his thunderbolts. In a vast war called the Titanomachy, Zeus and his older brothers and sisters, with the help of the Hecatoncheires and Cyclopes, overthrew Cronus and the other Titans. Afterwards, many of the Titans were confined in Tartarus. However, Oceanus, Helios, Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Astraeus were not imprisoned following the Titanomachy. Gaia bore the monster Typhon to claim revenge for the imprisoned Titans.
Accounts of the fate of Cronus after the Titanomachy differ. The most popular account is that found in the Iliad,Iliad 8.478-81; 14.203-4, 273-4; 15.225 Hesiod's Theogony,Hesiod, Theogony 851. and Apollodorus, all of which state that he was imprisoned with the other Titans in Tartarus. In two papyrus versions of a passage from Hesiod's Works and Days, however, Kronos rules over the Isle of the Blessed, having been released from Tartarus by Zeus.Hesiod, Works and Days 173a-c.Most editors take these lines to be a later interpolation. This version of Cronus's fate is also found in Pindar.Pindar Olympian 2 76-77 In a fragment of an Orphic cosmogony, Zeus intoxicates Cronus with honey, sending him to sleep, and then castrates him.Orphic Fragment 222.
Libyan account by Diodorus Siculus
In a Libyan account related by Diodorus Siculus (Book 3), Uranus and Titaea were the parents of Cronus and Rhea and the other Titans. Ammon, a king of Libya, married Rhea (3.18.1). However, Rhea abandoned Ammon and married her younger brother Cronus. With Rhea's incitement, Cronus and the other Titans made war upon Ammon, who fled to Crete (3.71.1–2). Cronus ruled harshly and Cronus in turn was defeated by Ammon's son Dionysus (3.71.3–3.73) who appointed Cronus's and Rhea's son, Zeus, as king of Egypt (3.73.4). Dionysus and Zeus then joined their forces to defeat the remaining Titans in Crete, and on the death of Dionysus, Zeus inherited all the kingdoms, becoming lord of the world (3.73.7–8).
Sibylline Oracles Cronus is mentioned in the Sibylline Oracles, particularly in book three, wherein Cronus, 'Titan,' and Iapetus, the three sons of Uranus and Gaia, each receive a third of the Earth, and Cronus is made king overall. After the death of Uranus, Titan's sons attempt to destroy Cronus's and Rhea's male offspring as soon as they are born. However, at Dodona, Rhea secretly bears her sons Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades and sends them to Phrygia to be raised in the care of three Cretans. Upon learning this, sixty of Titan's men then imprison Cronus and Rhea, causing the sons of Cronus to declare and fight the first of all wars against them. This account mentions nothing about Cronus either killing his father or attempting to kill any of his children.
Release from Tartarus In Hesiod's Theogony, and Homer's Iliad, Cronus and his Titan brothers are confined to Tartarus, apparently forever,Gantz, p. 46; Burkert 1985, p. 221; West 1966, p. 358. but in other traditions Cronus and the other imprisoned Titans are eventually set free by the mercy of Zeus.Gantz, pp. 46–48. Two papyrus versions of a passage of Hesiod's Works and Days mention Cronus being released by Zeus, and ruling over the heroes who go to the Isle of the Blessed; but other editions of Hesiod's text make no mention of this, and most editors agree that these lines of text are later interpolations in Hesiod's works.Gantz, pp. 46–47; West 1988, p. 76, note to line 173; West 1978, pp. 194–196, on lines 173a–e.
The poet Pindar, in one of his poems (462 BC), wrote that although Atlas still "strains against the weight of the sky ... Zeus freed the Titans",Pindar, Pythian 4.289–291. and in another poem (476 BC), Pindar has Cronus released from Tartarus and now ruling in the Isles of the Blessed, a mythical land where the Greek heroes reside in the afterlife:Gantz, p. 47; West 1978, p. 195 on line 173a.
Prometheus Lyomenos (Prometheus Unbound), an undated lost play by the playwright Aeschylus (c. 525 – c. 455 BC), features a chorus composed of freed Titans as witnesses of Prometheus's freeing from the rock, perhaps including Cronus himself, although the now freed Titans are not individually identified.
Other accounts
In one version of Typhon's origins, after the defeat of the Giants, Gaia in anger slandered Zeus to Hera, and she went to Cronus. Cronus gave his daughter two eggs smeared with his own semen and told her to bury them underground, so that they would produce a creature capable of dethroning Zeus. Hera did so, and thus Typhon came to be.Kirk, Raven, and Schofield. pp. 59–60 no. 52; Ogden 2013b, pp. 36–38; Fontenrose, p. 72; Gantz, pp. 50–51, Ogden 2013a, p. 76 n. 46. Ogden 2013a, p. 150, n. 6, seems to conclude from the fact that the eggs were buried underground, that Earth (Gaia) was therefore considered to be the mother.
Cronus was said to be the father of the wise centaur Chiron by the Oceanid Philyra, who was subsequently transformed into a linden tree.Tzetzes on Lycophron, 1200Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7. 197Scholia ad Apollonius Rhodius, 2.1231 citing Pherecydes The god lay with the nymph, but his wife Rhea discovered them fornicating; in order to escape, Cronus transformed into a stallion and galloped away, hence the half-human, half-equine shape of their offspring.Apollonius Rhodius, 2.1231 ff. with scholia ad, 1.554 This episode was said to have taken place on Mount Pelion.Callimachus, Hymn 4 to Delos 104 ff
Two other sons of Cronus and Philyra may have been DolopsHyginus, Fabulae, Preface. and Aphrus, the ancestor and eponym of the Aphroi, i.e. the native Africans.Suda s.v. Aphroi In some accounts, Cronus was also called the father of the Corybantes.Strabo, Geographica 10.3.19.