Cronus

The Titan King

Cronus was the youngest and, in Hesiod's words, "the most terrible" of the twelve Titans born to Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth). At his mother's urging, he ended his father's oppressive rule of the cosmos and became king of the Titans, ruling during what later poets called the Golden Age, a time of ease and abundance before toil and old age.

The Castration of Uranus

Uranus hated the children Gaia bore him and hid them away inside her, causing her great pain. Gaia forged a sickle of adamant and asked her sons to punish their father. Only Cronus agreed. He ambushed Uranus, castrated him, and cast the severed member into the sea, from whose foam Aphrodite was born.

Swallowing His Children

Having learned from his parents that he was destined to be overthrown by one of his own children, Cronus swallowed each child his wife and sister Rhea bore him: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. When Zeus was born, Rhea hid him on Crete and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow instead. Grown to maturity, Zeus forced Cronus to disgorge his siblings and led them in the ten-year war against the Titans, the Titanomachy, which ended with Cronus and most of the Titans imprisoned in Tartarus.

The Golden Age and Later Cult

Hesiod's Works and Days separately describes a Golden Age of mortals who "lived like gods" under Cronus's rule, free from grief and labor. This tradition fed into the Athenian festival of the Kronia and, at Rome, the Saturnalia held for Cronus's Roman counterpart Saturn, though Saturn's own mythology diverges from Cronus's in significant ways and is not treated here.