Cronus

Also known as: Cronos · Family: Titans · Role: king of the gods · First appears: Apollodorus, Library 1.1

🌐 Also appears in: The Iliad (as Saturn) · The Odyssey (as Saturn) · The Aeneid (as Saturn) · The Metamorphoses of Ovid (as Saturn) · Paradise Lost (as Saturn)

Cronus, also called Cronos, was the youngest child of Earth and Sky, whom Hesiod describes as “the wily, youngest and most terrible” of her children. He hated Heaven and, after Earth persuaded the Titans to attack Sky, overthrew his father with an adamantine sickle. The Titans rescued Briareos, Gyes, Cottus, Arges, Steropes, and Brontes from Tartarus and gave Cronus sovereignty, but he later rebound them there and wedded his sister Rhea.

Forewarned by Earth and Sky that his own son would dethrone him, Cronus swallowed his children at birth: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. When Rhea was about to bear Zeus, she concealed him with Earth’s help and gave Cronus a swaddled stone instead. Metis later gave Cronus a drug that forced him to disgorge the stone and the children he had swallowed; with Zeus and his allies, the gods defeated Cronus and the Titans and imprisoned them in Tartarus. Cronus was also the parent of Chiron with Philyra.