Titaness of motherhood and the mountain wilds, daughter of Uranus and Gaia, wife of Cronus and mother of the six eldest Olympians, who saved the infant Zeus from her husband's belly with a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes.1
Gaia bore her to starry Uranus among the elder Titans, sister of deep-swirling Oceanus, Hyperion and Iapetus, of Theia, Themis and gold-crowned Phoebe; and after them all came Cronus the wily, youngest and most terrible of that brood. When Cronus had unseated their father and bound his rivals, he took his sister Rhea to wife, and she became queen of the world's second age.2
To Cronus she bore splendid children — Hestia, Demeter, gold-sandalled Hera, strong Hades, the deep-roaring Earth-Shaker, and Zeus the counsellor. But great Cronus had learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overthrown by his own son, and so he swallowed each child as it came from the womb to its mother's knees — Hestia first, then the rest in turn — and unceasing grief took hold of Rhea.3
When she was about to bear Zeus, she begged her parents Gaia and Uranus to devise a plan, and they sent her to Lyctus in Crete. Earth took the newborn to nurse in a remote cave on thick-wooded Mount Aigaion — the cave Apollodorus places on Dicte, where the nymphs Adrasteia and Ida fed the child on the milk of Amalthea and the armed Curetes clashed spear on shield to drown his crying. To Cronus, Rhea handed a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, and he thrust it down into his belly without a doubt. Hyginus tells the trick of Opis, as the Romans named her, the same way: Saturn devoured the wrapped stone while the baby's cradle was hung in a tree, that he might be found neither in heaven nor on earth nor in the sea; and his star-myths count the boy's nurses among the nymphs of Cretan Ida.4
The stone Cronus vomited up first of all he had swallowed, and Zeus set it fast in the earth at holy Pytho beneath the glens of Parnassus; in Pausanias' day the Delphians still poured oil over a stone of no great size each morning and said it was the very one. The traveller heard Rhea's story claimed for other soils too: the Methydrians of Arcadia held that, pregnant with Zeus, she enlisted the giant Hopladamus and his band on Mount Thaumasius in case Cronus should attack her, and that it was there, not in Crete, that the stone deceived him — a cave of Rhea on the summit may be entered by none but the women sacred to the goddess — while on Mount Lykaion the Arcadians showed a place called Cretea and insisted that the Crete where Zeus was reared was theirs and not the island. The Arcadians also said that Rhea had saved Poseidon the same way long before, laying the baby in a flock of lambs and giving Cronus a foal to swallow, declaring she had given birth to a horse.5
The eldest gods remembered her care: in Homer, Hera recalls how Rhea handed her to Oceanus and Tethys to be nursed in their halls while Zeus thrust Cronus down beneath the earth and the unresting sea. Apollonius' Orpheus sings how Cronus and Rhea took snowy Olympus from Ophion and Eurynome while Zeus was still a child in the Dictaean cave; and when storms pinned the Argonauts at Cyzicus, they climbed Mount Dindymon, carved an image of the Mother of all the blessed gods from an ancient vine-stump, and danced in full armour about her altar — for to her, said the seer Mopsus, even Zeus himself gives place. The goddess answered with flowers, fawning beasts and a spring gushing from the dry peak, and ever since, says the poet, the Phrygians propitiate Rhea with the wheel and the drum — the Mother of Dindymon whom later tradition would name Cybele.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
