Not to be confused with
Chronos, the personification of time.
| Cronus |
|---|
| Titan of the Harvest |
 |
| Abode | Mount Othrys |
|---|
| Symbol | Sickle, scythe, grain, snake, and harpe |
|---|
| Consort | Rhea |
|---|
| Parents | Uranus and Gaia |
|---|
| Siblings | The Titans: Rhea,Oceanus, Hyperion,Theia, Coeus, Phoebe,Iapetus, Crius,Mnemosyne, Tethys, andThemis, the Cyclopes, and the Hecatonchires |
|---|
| Children | Zeus, Hera, Poseidon,Hades, Hestia, Demeter,Chiron |
|---|
| Roman equivalent | Saturn |
|---|
Greek deities
series |
|---|
|
|
| Titans |
|---|
- The Twelve Titans
- Oceanus and Tethys,
- Hyperion and Theia,
- Coeus and Phoebe,
- Cronus and Rhea,
- Mnemosyne, Themis,
- Crius, Iapetus
- Children of Cronus
- Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades,
- Hestia, Demeter, Chiron
- Children of Oceanus
- Oceanids, Potamoi
- Children of Hyperion
- Helios, Selene, Eos
- Children of Coeus
- Lelantos, Leto, Asteria
- Sons of Iapetus
- Atlas, Prometheus,
- Epimetheus, Menoetius
- Sons of Crius
- Astraeus, Pallas, Perses
|
|
|
In
Greek mythology,
Cronus, also known as
Kronos (
or
from
Greek:
Κρόνος,
krónos), was the leader and youngest of the first generation of
Titans, the divine descendants of
Uranus, the sky, and
Gaia, the earth. He overthrew his father and ruled during the mythological
Golden Age, until he was overthrown by his own son
Zeus and imprisoned in
Tartarus.
Cronus was usually depicted with a
harpe,
scythe or a
sickle, which was the instrument he used to
castrate and depose
Uranus, his father. In
Athens, on the twelfth day of the Attic month of
Hekatombaion, a festival called
Kronia was held in honour of Cronus to celebrate the harvest, suggesting that, as a result of his association with the virtuous Golden Age, Cronus continued to preside as a patron of
harvest. Cronus was also identified in
classical antiquity with the
Roman deity Saturn.
Greek mythology[edit]
In an ancient myth recorded by
Hesiod's
Theogony, Cronus envied the power of his father, the ruler of the universe, Uranus. Uranus drew the enmity of Cronus's mother,
Gaia, when he hid the gigantic youngest children of Gaia, the hundred-handed
Hecatonchiresand one-eyed
Cyclopes, in the
Tartarus, so that they would not see the light. Gaia created
a great stone sickle and gathered together Cronus and his brothers to persuade them to castrate Uranus.
[1]
Only Cronus was willing to do the deed, so Gaia gave him the sickle and placed him in ambush. When Uranus met with Gaia, Cronus attacked him with the sickle,
castrating him and casting his
testicles into the sea. From the
blood that spilled out from Uranus and fell upon the earth, the
Gigantes,
Erinyes, and
Meliae were produced. The testicles produced a white foam from which the goddess
Aphrodite emerged.
[1] For this, Uranus threatened vengeance and called his sons
Titenes (Τιτῆνες; according to Hesiod meaning "straining ones," the source of the word "titan", but this etymology is disputed) for overstepping their boundaries and daring to commit such an act. (In an alternate version of this myth, a more benevolent Cronus overthrew the wicked serpentine Titan
Ophion. In doing so, he released the world from bondage and for a time ruled it justly.)
After dispatching Uranus, Cronus re-imprisoned the
Hecatonchires, and the
Cyclopesand set the dragon
Campe to guard them. He and his sister
Rhea took the throne of the world as king and queen. The period in which Cronus ruled was called the
Golden Age, as the people of the time had no need for laws or rules; everyone did the right thing, and immorality was absent.
Cronus learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own sons, just as he had overthrown his father. As a result, although he sired the gods
Demeter,
Hestia,
Hera,
Hades and
Poseidon by Rhea, he devoured them all as soon as they were born to prevent the prophecy. When the sixth child,
Zeus, was born Rhea sought Gaia to devise a plan to save them and to eventually get retribution on Cronus for his acts against his father and children. (Cronus also fathered
Chiron, by
Philyra.)
Rhea secretly gave birth to Zeus in
Crete, and handed Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, also known as the
OmphalosStone, which he promptly swallowed, thinking that it was his son.
Rhea kept Zeus hidden in a cave on
Mount Ida, Crete. According to some versions of the story, he was then raised by a goat named
Amalthea, while a company of
Kouretes, armored male dancers, shouted and clapped their hands to make enough noise to mask the baby's cries from Cronus. Other versions of the myth have Zeus raised by the
nymph Adamanthea, who hid Zeus by dangling him by a rope from a tree so that he was suspended between the earth, the sea, and the sky, all of which were ruled by his father, Cronus. Still other versions of the tale say that Zeus was raised by his grandmother, Gaia.
Once he had grown up, Zeus used an
emetic given to him by Gaia to force Cronus to disgorge the contents of his stomach in reverse order: first the stone, which was set down at Pytho under the glens of
Mount Parnassus to be a sign to mortal men, and then his two brothers and three sisters. In other versions of the tale,
Metis gave Cronus an emetic to force him to disgorge the children, or Zeus cut Cronus's stomach open. After freeing his siblings, Zeus released the Hecatonchires, and the Cyclopes who forged for him his thunderbolts, Poseidon's trident and Hades' helmet of darkness.
In a vast war called the
Titanomachy, Zeus and his brothers and sisters, with the help of the Hecatonchires, and Cyclopes, overthrew Cronus and the other Titans. Afterwards, many of the Titans were confined in
Tartarus, however, Atlas, Epimetheus, Helios, Menoetius, Oceanus and Prometheus were not imprisoned following the
Titanomachy. Gaia bore the monster
Typhon to claim revenge for the imprisoned Titans.
Accounts of the fate of Cronus after the Titanomachy differ. In
Homeric and other texts he is imprisoned with the other Titans in Tartarus. In Orphic poems, he is imprisoned for eternity in the cave of Nyx. Pindar describes his release from Tartarus, where he is made King of
Elysium by Zeus. In another version
[citation needed], the Titans released the Cyclopes from Tartarus, and Cronus was awarded the kingship among them, beginning a Golden Age. In
Virgil's
Aeneid[citation needed], it is
Latium to which Saturn (Cronus) escapes and ascends as king and lawgiver, following his defeat by his son Jupiter (Zeus).
One other account referred by
Robert Graves[2] (who claims to be following the account of the Byzantine mythographer
Tzetzes) it is said that Cronus was castrated by his son Zeus just like he had done with his father Uranus before. However the subject of a son castrating his own father, or simply castration in general, was so repudiated by the Greek mythographers of that time that they suppressed it from their accounts until the Christian era (when Tzetzes wrote).
Libyan account by Diodorus Siculus[edit]
In a Libyan account related by
Diodorus Siculus (Book 3), Uranus and Titaea were the parents of Cronus and Rhea and the other Titans. Ammon, a king of
Lybia, married Rhea (3.18.1). But Rhea abandoned Ammon, and married her brother Cronus, and at Rhea's urging, with the other Titans made war upon Ammon, who fled to Crete (3.71.1-2). But Cronus ruled harshly, and Cronus in turn is defeated by Ammon's son Dionysus (3.71.3-3.73), who appoints Cronus' and Rhea's son, Zeus, as king of Egypt (3.73.4). Dionysus and Zeus then join their forces to defeat the remaining Titans in Crete, and on the death of Dionysus, Zeus inherits all the kingdoms, becoming lord of the world (3.73.7-8).
Sibylline Oracles[edit]
Cronus is again mentioned in the
Sibylline Oracles, particularly book three, which makes Cronus, 'Titan' and
Iapetus, the three sons of Uranus and Gaia, each to receive a third division of the Earth, and Cronus is made king over all. After the death of Uranus, Titan's sons attempt to destroy Cronus's and Rhea's male offspring as soon as they are born, but at
Dodona, Rhea secretly bears her sons Zeus, Poseidon and Hades and sends them to
Phrygia to be raised in the care of three Cretans. Upon learning this, sixty of Titan's men then imprison Cronus and Rhea, causing the sons of Cronus to declare and fight the first of all wars against them. This account mentions nothing about Cronus either killing his father or attempting to kill any of his children.
Name and comparative mythology[edit]
Antiquity[edit]
During antiquity, Cronus was occasionally interpreted as
Chronos, the personification of time.
[3] The Greek historian and biographer
Plutarch asserted that the Greeks believed that Cronus was an allegorical name for χρόνος (time).
[4] The Roman philosopher
Cicero elaborated on this by saying that the Greek name Kronos is synonymous to chronos (time) since he maintains the course and cycles of seasons and the periods of time, whereas the Latin name
Saturn denotes that he is saturated with years since he was devouring his sons, which implies that time devours the ages and gorges.
[5] The philosopher
Plato in his
Cratylus gives two possible interpretations for the name of Cronus. The first is that his name denotes "κόρος" (koros), the pure (
καθαρόν) and unblemished (ἀκήρατον)
[6] nature of his mind.
[7] The second is that Rhea and Cronus were given names of streams (Rhea – ῥοή (rhoē) and Cronus – Xρόνος (chronos)).
[8] Proclus, the
Neoplatonist philosopher makes in his Commentary on Plato's Cratylus an extensive analysis on Cronus; among others he says that the "One cause" of all things is "Chronos" (time) that is also equivocal to Cronus.
[9] In addition to the name, the story of Cronus eating his children was also interpreted as an allegory to a specific aspect of time held within Cronus's sphere of influence. As the theory went, Cronus represented the destructive ravages of time which devoured all things, a concept that was definitely illustrated when the Titan king ate the Olympian gods — the past consuming the future, the older generation suppressing the next generation.
[10]
From the Renaissance to the present[edit]
During the
Renaissance, the identification of Cronus and Chronos gave rise to "
Father Time" wielding the harvesting scythe.
H. J. Rose in 1928
[11] observed that attempts to give
Kronos a Greek etymology had failed. Recently, Janda (2010) offers a genuinely Indo-European etymology of "the cutter", from the root
*(s)ker- "to cut" (Greek
κείρω (keirō), c.f. English
shear), motivated by Cronus's characteristic act of "cutting the sky" (or the genitals of anthropomorphic Uranus). The Indo-Iranian reflex of the root is
kar, generally meaning "to make, create" (whence
karma), but Janda argues that the original meaning "to cut" in a cosmogonic sense is still preserved in some verses of the
Rigveda pertaining to
Indra's heroic "cutting", like that of Cronus resulting in creation:
RV 10.104.10
ārdayad vṛtram akṛṇod ulokaṃ "he hit
Vrtra fatally, cutting [> creating] a free path"
RV 6.47.4
varṣmāṇaṃ divo akṛṇod "he cut [> created] the loftiness of the sky."
This may point to an older
Indo-European mytheme reconstructed as
*(s)kert wersmn diwos "by means of a cut he created the loftiness of the sky".
[12] The myth of Cronus castrating Uranus parallels the
Song of Kumarbi, where
Anu (the heavens) is castrated by Kumarbi. In the
Song of Ullikummi,
Teshub uses the "sickle with which heaven and earth had once been separated" to defeat the monster Ullikummi,
[13] establishing that the "castration" of the heavens by means of a sickle was part of a
creation myth, in origin a cut creating an
opening or gap between heaven (imagined as a
dome of stone) and earth enabling the beginning of time (
chronos) and human history.
[14] A theory debated in the 19th century, and sometimes still offered somewhat apologetically,
[15] holds that
Kronos is related to "horned", assuming a Semitic derivation from
qrn.
[16] Andrew Lang's objection, that Cronus was never represented horned in Hellenic art,
[17] was addressed by Robert Brown,
[18] arguing that in Semitic usage, as in the
Hebrew Bible qeren was a signifier of "power". When Greek writers encountered the Semitic deity
El, they rendered his name as
Kronos.
[19]
Robert Graves proposed that
cronos meant "crow", related to the Ancient Greek word
corōnē (κορώνη) "crow", noting that Cronus was depicted with a crow, as were the deities Apollo, Asclepius, Saturn and
Bran.
[20]
El, the Phoenician Cronus[edit]
When Hellenes encountered Phoenicians and, later, Hebrews, they identified the Semitic
El, by
interpretatio graeca, with Cronus. The association was recorded c. AD 100 by
Philo of Byblos' Phoenician history, as reported in
Eusebius'
Præparatio Evangelica I.10.16.
[21] Philo's account, ascribed by Eusebius to the semi-legendary pre-
Trojan WarPhoenician historian
Sanchuniathon, indicates that Cronus was originally a
Canaanite ruler who founded
Byblos and was subsequently deified. This version gives his alternate name as
Elus or
Ilus, and states that in the 32nd year of his reign, he emasculated, slew and deified his father Epigeius or Autochthon "whom they afterwards called Uranus". It further states that after ships were invented, Cronus, visiting the 'inhabitable world', bequeathed
Attica to his own daughter
Athena, and
Egypt to
Taautus the son of
Misor and inventor of writing.
[22]
Roman mythology and later culture[edit]
While the Greeks considered Cronus a cruel and tempestuous force of chaos and disorder, believing the Olympian gods had brought an era of peace and order by seizing power from the crude and malicious Titans, the Romans took a more positive and innocuous view of the deity, by conflating their indigenous deity
Saturn with Cronus. Consequently, while the Greeks considered Cronus merely an intermediary stage between Uranus and Zeus, he was a larger aspect of
Roman religion. The
Saturnalia was a festival dedicated in his honour, and at least one
temple to Saturn already existed in the archaic
Roman Kingdom.
His association with the "Saturnian" Golden Age eventually caused him to become the god of "time", i.e., calendars, seasons, and harvests—not now confused with
Chronos, the unrelated embodiment of time in general; nevertheless, among
Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria and during the
Renaissance, Cronus was conflated with the name of
Chronos, the personification of "
Father Time",
[3]wielding the harvesting scythe.
As a result of Cronus's importance to the Romans, his Roman variant, Saturn, has had a large influence on
Western culture. The seventh day of the Judaeo-Christian week is called in
Latin Dies Saturni ("Day of Saturn"), which in turn was adapted and became the source of the
English word
Saturday. In
astronomy, the planet
Saturn is named after the Roman deity. It is the outermost of the
Classical planets (those that are visible with the naked eye).
Cronus's descendants[edit]
| [hide]Descendants of Cronus and Rhea [23] |
|---|
|
|
