Rhea

Five births with the same ending

Rhea gives birth, and her husband Kronos swallows the child. The same thing happens with Hestia, then Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. Gaia and Uranus, the Earth and the Sky, have warned Kronos that his own son will overthrow him. So he tries to end each life as soon as it begins.

The early Greek poet Hesiod, in his Theogony, a poem on the origins of the gods, names Rhea among the Titan children of Earth and Sky. She marries her brother Kronos. That makes her the mother of the generation that will replace their own. Yet at first she has no power to keep her children out of Kronos’s body. Each birth makes the ruler seem safer and deepens Rhea’s loss.

The sixth child changes her approach. Rhea does not confront Kronos or plead with him. She asks her parents for advice and goes to the island of Crete before Zeus is born.

Which Cretan cave receives Zeus?

On Crete, Rhea wraps a stone in baby clothes and sets it before Kronos. He swallows it and never finds out that Zeus is somewhere else. Of all her births, this is the only one she saves, and she does it by giving Kronos something that only looks like the child.

The ancient accounts agree on Crete and on the stone, but not on the mountain. Hesiod places Rhea near Lyctus. In his telling, Gaia carries the newborn to a hidden cave on wooded Mount Aegeum. Apollodorus, who retold the myths in a book called the Library, names a cave of Dicte instead. In his version Rhea gives Zeus to Adrastia and Ida, the daughters of Melisseus, and the goat Amalthea gives him milk.

The Curetes, armed guardians, protect the cave with noise. They beat their spears against their shields around the baby, so that Kronos cannot hear him cry. The din of armed men becomes cover for a helpless child.

How does concealment become victory?

Rhea’s trick does not bring back the five swallowed gods at once. It gives Zeus the time he needs to grow up out of Kronos’s reach. Later, the goddess Metis gives Kronos a drug that makes him bring the children back up. Zeus then leads them in war against the Titans.

The change of rulers depends on several goddesses. In Hesiod, Gaia hides the baby. Rhea plans the swap of the stone. In Apollodorus, Metis frees the brothers and sisters. Zeus becomes the king everyone sees, but his survival starts with a chain of choices made before he can act for himself.

This sets Rhea apart from the earth goddess that later readers sometimes make of her. The early poems give her no grand speech about fertility and no long list of powers. Her authority shows in one decision. She refuses to let the sixth birth end like the first five.

The cave above Psychro

A cave above the village of Psychro, on the Lasithi Plateau, came to be identified as the Dictaean Cave, where Zeus was born. Over a long period, worshippers left pottery, figurines, weapons and other offerings there. These objects show that the cave was holy. They do not show which ancient mountain name belongs to it.

Excavation at the site in the 1899 to 1900 season recorded a large double cave above the village. The dig also explored the layers beneath ground already disturbed when antiquities had been removed earlier. That excavation gave the later identification a solid archaeological setting. It did not settle whether the cave belongs to Hesiod’s Mount Aegeum or to Apollodorus’s Dicte.

Rhea and the Mother of the Gods

In later worship, Rhea was drawn towards Cybele, the Mother of the Gods worshipped in Phrygia. The link joined two mother goddesses, but it did not make their worship the same in every detail. Rhea’s Roman name, Ops, and Cybele’s own history of rites come from different later stages in the history of her worship.

At Olympia, the sanctuary of Zeus, this overlap had a real building. The Metroon, or temple of the Mother, was built early in the fourth century BC. It was a small temple in the Doric style, a style of Greek temple building. There the Mother of the Gods was worshipped as Rhea or Cybele. In later centuries, Roman emperors were represented inside, which changed its use while the old name lasted.

The building stood inside the great sanctuary of Zeus. Rhea, whose defining act was to take her son out of his father’s reach, was worshipped within the holy ground that the child she saved came to rule.