The modern image of Saturn or Cronus as Father Time, an old man with a scythe or hourglass, rests on an ancient pun. The Titan's name Kronos and the Greek word chronos, time, are unrelated in origin but close in sound, and by the Hellenistic period allegorists had merged them, reading the god who swallows his own children as time devouring all that it brings forth. Roman Saturn absorbed the same idea, and his sickle, properly an agricultural tool tying him to the harvest and the Golden Age, was reinterpreted as the scythe of the reaper. Renaissance mythographers completed the figure, and the melancholy, saturnine old man measuring out mortality is the form in which the Titan most often survives in Western art, far from the cosmological usurper of Hesiod.
The war between the Olympians and the Titans under Cronus's leadership, the Titanomachy, received its most spectacular ancient visual treatment on the Great Altar of Pergamon, built in the second century BCE and now reconstructed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, whose monumental frieze of gods battling giants, though technically a Gigantomachy rather than a Titanomachy proper, drew on the same Hesiodic tradition of cosmic conflict that first fixed Cronus's downfall in writing. Hesiod's Theogony, composed around the eighth century BCE, remains the earliest surviving connected account of Cronus's castration of Uranus and his own overthrow by Zeus, the source from which nearly all later Greek and Roman versions of the myth ultimately descend.