CRONUS

Youngest of the children of Uranus and Gaia, Cronus of the crooked counsel alone dared the deed his mother asked. Gaia, groaning under the children Sky had hidden away inside her, forged a great sickle of adamant and called on her sons for vengeance; only Cronus answered. From ambush he stretched out his left hand, took the jagged sickle in his right, and reaped his own father's manhood as Sky came down upon Earth — and the bloody drops that fell upon Gaia bore in season the Erinyes, the Giants in gleaming armor, and the ash-tree nymphs. 1Hesiod · Pseudo-Apollodorus — Theogony 154–187; Bibliotheca 1.1.4

The immortal flesh itself he flung into the restless sea, and in Hesiod's telling a white foam gathered about it, and within the foam a goddess grew. She drifted past holy Cythera and came ashore at Cyprus, and grass sprang up beneath her feet: Aphrodite, foam-born — by this account older than the Olympians, sprung from the very stroke of Cronus' sickle. 2Hesiod — Theogony 188–206⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens above

King in his father's place, Cronus wed his sister Rhea — and learned from Gaia and starry Uranus that he was fated in turn to be overcome by his own son. So he swallowed each child as it came to its mother's knees: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon. Rhea bore Zeus in secret on Crete and handed Cronus a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes — the same trick Hyginus tells of Saturn and Ops. When Zeus was grown, Cronus was made to disgorge his children, the stone coming up first; it was planted at Pytho beneath Parnassus, and Pausanias saw it at Delphi still, anointed with olive oil every day. Ten years the Titanomachy raged, until with thunderbolt, Cyclopes and Hundred-Handers the younger gods hurled Cronus and his brothers down into Tartarus. Yet the poets allowed him kinder endings: in Works and Days Zeus releases him to rule the heroes in the Isles of the Blessed, and Ovid remembers his reign as the Golden Age, when the unploughed earth gave all things freely — before Saturn was thrust into gloomy Tartarus and a lesser age began. 3Hesiod · Pseudo-Apollodorus · Hyginus · Pausanias · Ovid — Theogony 453–506, 617–735; Works and Days 166–173; Bibliotheca 1.1.5–1.2.1; Fabulae 139; Description of Greece 10.24.6; Metamorphoses 1.89–115

When the war was won, says Homer, the three sons of Cronus shook lots for his inheritance: Poseidon drew the grey sea, Hades the murky dark, and Zeus the broad sky, with the earth and high Olympus held in common — which is why Poseidon could insist he was Zeus' equal. Apollodorus likewise has the brothers cast lots for the sovereignty after shutting the Titans in Tartarus. 4Homer · Pseudo-Apollodorus — Iliad 15.187–193; Bibliotheca 1.2.1⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens above

Hesiod knows no lottery over Cronus' empire: when the blessed gods had settled their struggle with the Titans, they pressed far-seeing Zeus, at Gaia's prompting, to reign and rule over the immortals, and it was Zeus himself who divided the honors among them. 5Hesiod — Theogony 881–885⚖Told differently in other tellings — change the lens above