Cronus facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Cronus
God of the harvest
Member of the Titans
Rhea offers the stone to Cronus, red-figure ceramic vase c. 460-450 BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Ancient Greek	Κρόνος
Predecessor	Uranus
Successor	Zeus
Abode	Mount Othrys (formerly) Tartarus
Planet	Saturn
Battles	Titanomachy
Animals	Snake
Symbol	Grain, sickle, scythe
Day	Saturday (hēméra Krónou)
Personal information
Consort	Rhea
Offspring	Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera, Zeus, Chiron
Parents	Uranus and Gaia
Siblings	Titans Crius Coeus Dione Hyperion Iapetus Oceanus Mnemosyne Phoebe Rhea Tethys Theia Themis Hecatoncheires Briareos Cottus Gyges Cyclopes Arges Brontes Steropes Other siblings Gigantes Erinyes Meliae Half-siblings Aphrodite Eurybia Ceto Nereus Phorcys Pontus Python Thaumas Typhon Uranus
Equivalents
Roman equivalent	Saturn
Egyptian equivalent	Geb
Mesopotamian equivalent	Ninurta, Enlil

In Ancient Greek religion and mythology, Cronus, Cronos, or Kronos ( or from Greek: Κρόνος, Krónos) was the leader and youngest of the first generation of Titans, the divine descendants of the primordial Gaia (Mother Earth) and Uranus (Father Sky). He overthrew his father and ruled during the mythological Golden Age, until he was overthrown by his own son Zeus and imprisoned in Tartarus. According to Plato, however, the deities Phorcys, Cronus, and Rhea were the eldest children of Oceanus and Tethys.

Cronus was usually depicted with a harpe, scythe or a sickle, which was the instrument he used to 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 the harvest. Cronus was also identified in classical antiquity with the Roman deity Saturn.

Mythology

Rise to power

In an ancient myth recorded by Hesiod's Theogony, Cronus envied the power of his father, Uranus, the ruler of the universe. Uranus drew the enmity of Cronus's mother, Gaia, when he hid the gigantic youngest children of Gaia, the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires and one-eyed Cyclopes, in 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 depose Uranus.

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. From the blood that spilled out from Uranus and fell upon the earth, the Gigantes, Erinyes, and Meliae were produced. His body parts that were cut off produced a white foam from which the goddess Aphrodite emerged. For this, Uranus threatened vengeance and called his sons Titenes for overstepping their boundaries and daring to commit such an act. After the deed was done, Cronus cast his sickle into the waves, and it was concealed under the island of Corfu, which had been noted since antiquity for its sickle-like shape, and gave it its ancient name, Drepane ("sickle").

While Hesiod seems to imply Cronus never let them free to begin with, Pseudo-Apollodorus says that after dispatching Uranus, Cronus re-imprisoned the Hecatoncheires and the Cyclopes and set the dragon Campe to guard them. He and his older 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. In some authors, a different divine pair, Ophion and Eurynome, a daughter of Oceanus, were said to have ruled Mount Olympus in the early age of the Titans. Rhea fought Eurynome and Cronus fought Ophion, and after defeating them they threw them into the waves of the ocean, thus becoming rulers in their place.

King of Gods

After securing his place as the new king of gods, Cronus learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own children, 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.

Rhea secretly gave birth to Zeus in Crete, and handed Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, also known as the Omphalos Stone, which he promptly swallowed, thinking that it was his son. According to one Roman author, when Rhea presented the swaddled rock to him, Cronus asked her to nurse the infant one last time before he swallowed him. Rhea pressed her breast against the rock, and the milk that was sprayed across the heavens created the Milky Way galaxy. Cronus then ate the rock.

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 Curetes, 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. One Cretan myth relates how Cronus once went to Crete himself, and Zeus, in order to hide from his father, transformed himself into a snake, and changed his nymph nurses, Helice and Cynosura into bears, who later became the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor respectively. In another myth, Cronus transformed the Curetes into lions, but Rhea made them her sacred animals and yoked them in her chariot.

Overthrown

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.

Rhea giving the rock to Cronus, 19th-century painted frieze by Karl Friedrich Schinkel

After freeing his siblings, Zeus released the Hecatoncheires and the Cyclopes who forged for him his thunderbolts, Poseidon's trident, and Hades' helm of darkness. In a vast war called the Titanomachy, Zeus and his older brothers and sisters, with the help of the Hecatoncheires and Cyclopes, overthrew Cronus and the other Titans. Afterwards, many of the Titans were confined in Tartarus. However, Oceanus, Helios, Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Astraeus 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.

Libyan account by Diodorus Siculus

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 Libya, married Rhea (3.18.1). However, Rhea abandoned Ammon and married her younger brother Cronus. With Rhea's incitement, Cronus and the other Titans made war upon Ammon, who fled to Crete (3.71.1–2). Cronus ruled harshly and Cronus in turn was defeated by Ammon's son Dionysus (3.71.3–3.73) who appointed Cronus' and Rhea's son, Zeus, as king of Egypt (3.73.4). Dionysus and Zeus then joined their forces to defeat the remaining Titans in Crete, and on the death of Dionysus, Zeus inherited all the kingdoms, becoming lord of the world (3.73.7–8).

Sibylline Oracles

Cronus is mentioned in the Sibylline Oracles, particularly in book three, wherein Cronus, 'Titan,' and Iapetus, the three sons of Uranus and Gaia, each receive a third of the Earth, and Cronus is made king overall. After the death of Uranus, Titan's sons attempt to destroy Cronus's and Rhea's male offspring as soon as they are born. However, 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.

Release from Tartarus

In Hesiod's Theogony, and Homer's Iliad, Cronus and his Titan brothers are confined to Tartarus, apparently forever, but in other traditions Cronus and the other imprisoned Titans are eventually set free by the mercy of Zeus. Two papyrus versions of a passage of Hesiod's Works and Days mention Cronus being released by Zeus, and ruling over the heroes who go to the Isle of the Blessed; but other editions of Hesiod's text make no mention of this, and most editors agree that these lines of text are later interpolations in Hesiod's works.

And they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep swirling Ocean, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year, far from the deathless gods, and Cronos rules over them; for the father of men and gods released him from his bonds.

The poet Pindar, in one of his poems (462 BC), wrote that although Atlas still "strains against the weight of the sky ... Zeus freed the Titans", and in another poem (476 BC), Pindar has Cronus released from Tartarus and now ruling in the Isles of the Blessed, a mythical land where the Greek heroes reside in the afterlife:

Those who have persevered three times, on either side, to keep their souls free from all wrongdoing, follow Zeus' road to the end, to the tower of Cronus, where ocean breezes blow around the island of the blessed, and flowers of gold are blazing, some from splendid trees on land, while water nurtures others. With these wreaths and garlands of flowers they entwine their hands according to the righteous counsels of Rhadamanthys, whom the great father, the husband of Rhea whose throne is above all others, keeps close beside him as his partner.

Prometheus Lyomenos (Prometheus Unbound), an undated lost play by the playwright Aeschylus (c. 525 – c. 455 BC), features a chorus composed of freed Titans as witnesses of Prometheus' freeing from the rock, perhaps including Cronus himself, although the now freed Titans are not individually identified.

Other accounts

In one version of Typhon's origins, after the defeat of the Giants, Gaia in anger slandered Zeus to Hera, and she went to Cronus. Cronus gave his daughter two eggs and told her to bury them underground, so that they would produce a creature capable of dethroning Zeus. Hera did so, and thus Typhon came to be.

Cronus was said to be the father of the wise centaur Chiron by the Oceanid Philyra, who was subsequently transformed into a linden tree. The god consorted with the nymph, but his wife Rhea walked on them unexpectedly; in order to escape being caught in bed with another, Cronus changed into the shape of a stallion and galloped away, hence the half-human, half-equine shape of their offspring; this was said to have taken place on Mount Pelion.

Two other sons of Cronus and Philyra may have been Dolops and Aphrus, the ancestor and eponym of the Aphroi, i.e. the native Africans. In some accounts, Cronus was also called the father of the Corybantes.

Cronus is featured in one of the works of satirical writer Lucian of Samosata, Saturnalia, where he talks with one of his priests about his festival Saturnalia, with a central theme being the mistreatment of the poor by the rich during festival-time. In the dialogue, Cronus rejects the Hesiodic tradition of him eating his children and then being overthrown, and instead claims that he peacefully abdicated the throne in favour of his youngest son Zeus, although he still resumes rulership for seven days each year (his festival) in order to remind humanity of the plenteous, toil-free and luxuriant life they enjoyed under his reign before the Olympians took over.

Astronomy

A star (HD 240430) was named after him in 2017 when it was reported to have swallowed its planets. The planet Saturn, named after the Roman equivalent of Cronus, is still referred to as "Cronus" (Κρόνος) in modern Greek.

"Cronus" was also a suggested name for the dwarf planet Pluto, but was rejected and not voted for because it was suggested by the unpopular and egocentric astronomer Thomas Jefferson Jackson See.

Genealogy

See also

In Spanish: Kronos para niños