Domain: Time, the harvest, the ruling Titan Symbol: The sickle (or scythe), the grain Roman Equivalent: Saturn
Overview
Cronus is the youngest and boldest of the Titans, the son of Gaia and Uranus who overthrew his father and ruled the cosmos in the age before the Olympians — a span the Greeks remembered, paradoxically, as a Golden Age. He carries the sickle with which he unseated Uranus, and in later tradition he blurs into Chronos, Time itself: the power that harvests everything it brings to ripeness.
He is the hinge of the cosmogony — the son who ends his father's reign and then, in trying to keep his own, becomes the father who must be ended.
Key Myths
Devouring his children. Warned by Gaia and Uranus that one of his own children would overthrow him, Cronus swallowed each as Rhea bore them — Hera, Demeter, Hestia, Hades, and Poseidon all consumed at birth. It is the starkest image in the cosmogony of a power that would rather destroy the future than be replaced by it.
The stone and the fall. Rhea hid the infant Zeus and gave Cronus a swaddled stone to swallow instead. Grown in secret, Zeus forced his father to disgorge the others, and in the ten-year Titanomachy the Olympians cast Cronus and the Titans down into Tartarus — the prophecy fulfilled exactly as Cronus had fulfilled it against Uranus.