Kronos

The son who accepts the sickle

Gaia, the Earth, is in pain. Her husband Uranus, the Sky, keeps their children shut up inside her. She makes a sickle of adamant, a very hard metal, and asks the children to attack their father. The older ones hold back. Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, agrees.

When Uranus comes down to lie upon Earth, Kronos reaches out from his hiding place and castrates him. The act separates sky from earth. It also passes power to the son who was willing to use his mother’s weapon. The early Greek poet Hesiod calls Kronos “crooked-counselled”, a title that suits the trick that wins him the throne.

The victory also plants the fear that will rule him. A child has shown that a father’s reign can end suddenly, through violence planned inside the family. Kronos becomes king knowing exactly how kings are replaced.

Why does the new ruler repeat the old crime?

Uranus and Gaia warn Kronos that one of his own children will overthrow him. He marries his sister Rhea. Each time she has a baby, he swallows it: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. His method is different from his father’s, who shut the children away, but the aim is the same. The next generation must never be free to challenge him.

Rhea’s sixth pregnancy breaks the pattern. Here the sources differ on where. Hesiod sends her to Lyctus in Crete, where Gaia takes the baby Zeus and hides him in a cave on Mount Aegeum. Apollodorus, who retold the myths in a book called the Library, places the birth in a cave of Dicte. Nymphs care for the child, and armed guardians called the Curetes beat spear against shield so Kronos cannot hear him cry.

Both accounts keep the same trick. Rhea wraps a stone like a newborn baby and gives it to her husband. Kronos swallows it. His defence depends on catching and swallowing every child, and he fails because he never checks what is put in his hands.

The children return

Zeus grows up in hiding. In the version of Apollodorus, the goddess Metis gives Kronos a drug. It makes him bring up the stone, and then the five gods he swallowed. The family Kronos tried to hold inside him comes out whole and joins the son he missed.

Their war against the Titans lasts ten years. They win after Zeus frees the Cyclopes and the Hundred-Handers from Tartarus, a prison deep below the earth. The Cyclopes give him thunder and the thunderbolt. The Hundred-Handers overpower the old gods and later guard them below. Kronos loses his kingdom to prisoners set free, just as Uranus lost his to the children he locked away.

The pattern does not repeat exactly. Kronos acted with Gaia against Uranus, but now Rhea and Gaia work against Kronos. Each ruler makes enemies by treating his own family as a threat to be locked up. The prophecy comes true because the attempt to stop it creates the alliance that carries it out.

Prisoner or ruler of the blessed?

Even the poems credited to Hesiod disagree about how Kronos ends. The Theogony, his poem on the origins of the gods, places Kronos with the defeated Titans below Tartarus, under guard. A passage found in a longer version of Works and Days, another poem under his name, tells it differently. There Zeus releases Kronos and makes him ruler over the blessed heroes beside Ocean, at the far edge of the world.

This second ending links Kronos with the Golden Age. Works and Days remembers the first race of humans, who lived under Kronos with no hard work and no grief. Prison punishes the father who swallowed his children. Rule over the blessed keeps alive the memory of an earlier, easier world. The ancient evidence does not choose one ending.

The older king above Olympia

Olympia, the sanctuary of Zeus, kept a place for Kronos too. A sanctuary is a holy site set aside for a god. The travel writer Pausanias says that local scholars from Elis called Kronos the first king of heaven. They said the people of the Golden Race built his temple. They also linked Rhea’s guardians from Crete with the start of athletic contests. These guardians, the Idaean Dactyls, ran a race, and the eldest crowned the winner with wild olive.

Above the sanctuary of Zeus rose Mount Cronius. On its top, priests called the Basilae sacrificed to Kronos each spring, in the month of Elaphius. The old ruler was neither wiped out nor brought back into the sanctuary below. His yearly rite stayed on the hill that bears his name, above the games and altar of the son who replaced him.