Cronus

In Ancient Greek religion and mythology, Cronus, Cronos, or Kronos ( or , from el, 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 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 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 castrate 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, 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. 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.

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.

Overthrown

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.

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.

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. In yet another account referred to by Robert Graves, (who claims to be following the account of the Byzantine mythographer Tzetzes) it is said that Cronus was castrated by his son Zeus just as Uranus had earlier been castrated by his son Cronus. 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

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 were eventually set free by the mercy of Zeus. Two papyrus versions of a passage of Hesiods' '' 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 such thing, and most editors agree that these lines of text are later interpolations in Hesiod's works.

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:

''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 smeared with his own semen 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.Scholia on Apollonius Rhodius, ''Argonautica'' 2.1235 citing Pherecydes 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.

Name and comparative mythology

Antiquity

During antiquity, Cronus was occasionally interpreted as Chronos, the personification of time."Κρόνος , ὁ, Cronos �� Later interpreted as, = χρόνος": LSJ entr
Κρόνος
The Roman philosopher Cicero (1st century BC) elaborated on this by saying that the Greek name Cronus is synonymous to ''chrónos'' (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.

The Greek historian and biographer Plutarch (1st century AD) asserted that the Greeks believed that Cronus was an allegorical name for χρόνος (time). The philosopher Plato (3rd century BC) in his ''Cratylus'' gives two possible interpretations for the name of Cronus. The first is that his name denotes κόρος (kóros), "the pure" ( καθαρόν) and "unblemished" (ἀκήρατον) nature of his mind. The second is that Rhea and Cronus were given names of streams: Rhea from ῥοή (rhoē) "river, stream, flux" and Cronus from χρόνος (chronos) "time". Proclus (5th century), the Neoplatonist philosopher, makes in his Commentary on Plato's ''Cratylus'' an extensive analysis of Cronus; among others he says that the "One cause" of all things is "Chronos" (time) that is also equivalent to Cronus.

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' sphere of influence. As the theory went, Cronus represented the destructive ravages of time which devoured all things, a concept that was illustrated when the Titan king ate the Olympian gods—the past consuming the future, the older generation suppressing the next generation.

The Gnostic text ''Pistis Sophia'' (3rd–4th century) references the name Cronus, portraying the deity as a great ruler over others within the aeons.

From the Renaissance to the present

During the Renaissance, the identification of Cronus and Chronos gave rise to "Father Time" wielding the harvesting scythe.

H. J. Rose in 1928 observed that attempts to give the name Κρόνος 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''), cf. 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-'', 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:

This may point to an older Indo-European mytheme reconstructed as ' "by means of a cut he created the loftiness of the sky". 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, 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.

A theory debated in the 19th century, and sometimes still offered somewhat apologetically, holds that ''Κρόνος'' is related to "horned", assuming a Semitic derivation from '' qrn''. Andrew Lang's objection, that Cronus was never represented horned in Hellenic art, was addressed by Robert Brown, arguing that, in Semitic usage, as in the Hebrew Bible

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