In Greek mythology, Rhea (also Rhia or Rheia) is one of the Titans, daughter of Uranus and Gaia, sister-wife of Cronus, and mother of Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. She is the "mother of the gods" who saves the infant Zeus by giving Cronus a swaddled stone, and later appears as a supporting Olympian matriarch often conflated with Cybele. This entry is the Titaness — not the Saturnian moon Rhea.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Rhea (mythology)" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Family and the swaddled stone
Rhea belongs to the elder Titan generation. By Cronus she bore the six Olympian siblings. When Cronus, warned that a child would overthrow him, swallowed each newborn, Rhea — with Gaia and Uranus — hid the sixth child, Zeus, in Crete and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. The Curetes and Dactyls guarded the infant on Mount Ida with clashing shields.
After Zeus forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings and won the Titanomachy, Rhea withdrew from queenship but remained an ally of her children. Plato preserves an alternative genealogy in which Rhea, Cronus, and Phorcys are among the eldest children of Oceanus and Tethys.
II.Olympian era and later myths
Rhea attends the birth of Apollo, raises or heals Dionysus after Semele's death, and is sent by Zeus to persuade Demeter to return after Persephone's recovery. Bacchylides credits her with restoring Pelops to life. In the Argonautica and related tradition she blends with the Phrygian Great Mother; Roman religion equated her functionally with Ops and identified the Great Mother (Cybele / Magna Mater) with her Cretan-Idaean aspect.
Punitive tales include turning Hippomenes and Atalanta into lions for defiling her temple, and transforming offenders such as Sangas into a river. Orphic myth preserves a darker union of Zeus and Rhea that produces Persephone — a strand kept distinct from the Hesiodic Olympian family.
III.Cult and iconography
Rhea had few strong local cults under her own name; she was more widely honoured as Meter Theon ("Mother of the Gods"). Crete claimed her house near Knossos and the Idaean cave of Zeus's birth. Pausanias notes Metroa and Meter sanctuaries at Olympia, Athens, Corinth, Megalopolis, Sparta, and Akriai. Rites used drums, cymbals, and armed dances recalling the Curetes.
From the fourth century BCE her visual type often merges with Cybele: mural crown, throne flanked by lions, or a lion-drawn chariot. This notice concerns the mythological Titaness mother of Zeus, not Saturn's moon Rhea or other modern namesakes.