Crius

A name in two Titan lists

The early Greek poet Hesiod, whose Theogony is a poem on how the gods came to be, sets out the children that Earth bore to Heaven. Gaia lay with Uranus and brought forth Oceanus, then Coeus and Crius, then Hyperion and Iapetus, followed by the daughters and last of all by Cronos. Crius stands third in that list of twelve, under the Greek form Krios, and he is given nothing else there: no deed, no quarrel with his father, no part in the war that came later.

Apollodorus, who collected the myths in a book called the Library, gives the list again and names Crius in it. His roster of the Titan daughters is not the same one. Where Hesiod’s twelve hold Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys, Apollodorus seats Dione among them as well. The two lists agree on Crius and disagree on his sisters.

Eurybia and the three sons

What Hesiod does give Crius is a wife and three children. Eurybia joins with him and bears Astraeus, Pallas and Perses, the last of whom the poem calls eminent among all men in wisdom. Apollodorus names the same three sons, and gives their mother as a daughter of Pontus, the sea.

The three sons are the whole of what the texts build on him. Each marries into another line, and each of those marriages produces named powers of its own.

The winds and the stars

Astraeus takes Eos, the dawn, who is herself a Titan’s daughter: Theia bore her to Hyperion, along with the sun and the moon. Their children are the winds. Hesiod names Zephyrus, brightening; Boreas, headlong in his course; and Notus, born of a goddess mating in love with a god.

The same pair produce the lights of the night sky. After the winds, Hesiod says, the Early-born bore Eosphorus, the dawn-bringer, and the gleaming stars with which heaven is crowned. The morning star and the whole field of stars descend from Crius through this one son.

The four who stand beside Zeus

The second son, Pallas, joins with Styx, a daughter of Ocean and the water by which the gods swear. She bears Zelus, emulation; Nike, victory; Cratos, strength; and Bia, force. Hesiod says these four have no house apart from Zeus, no dwelling and no path except the one he leads them on, and that they live with him always.

The poem explains how that came about. Zeus called the deathless gods to Olympus and said that whoever fought beside him against the Titans would keep the office he already held, and that anyone without office under Cronos would be raised to one. Styx came first, with her children, through the wit of her father. Zeus honoured her for it: he appointed her the great oath of the gods and settled her children with him for good.

Crius is nowhere in that scene, and the text does not say where he stood.

Perses, Asteria and Hecate

The third son, Perses, led Asteria to his great house to be called his dear wife. Asteria is a daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe, and so a sister of Leto. Her daughter by Perses is Hecate.

Zeus honoured Hecate above all, Hesiod says. He gave her a share of the earth and of the unfruitful sea, and honour in starry heaven as well, and he took nothing from the portion she already held among the former Titan gods. What follows in the poem is a long account of what she does. She sits beside worshipful kings in judgement and distinguishes whom she will in the assembly. She gives victory in war and at the games, stands by horsemen and by men whose business is in the grey sea, increases the herds, and is a nurse of the young. Hesiod adds that she is her mother’s only child and is honoured all the more for it.

The island that carried Asteria’s name

Hesiod leaves Asteria in Perses’s house. Apollodorus leaves her somewhere else. In his account she took the likeness of a quail and flung herself into the sea to escape the advances of Zeus, and the place first called Asteria after her was afterwards named Delos. The sources leave her in both positions and do not reconcile them.

The poet Callimachus keeps the same identification in his hymn to Delos. The hymn tells the island that it was Asteria then and not yet called Delos, and addresses it as Asteria, island of incense, with the isles making a circle around it. Those isles are the Cyclades, which the hymn calls the most holy of the isles that lie in the sea.