The Titan Who Swallowed His Own Children

Cronus was the youngest of the twelve Titans, children of the primordial deities Uranus and Gaia, and Hesiod's Theogony gives him the decisive role in the succession myth that opens Greek cosmology. At his mother Gaia's urging, Cronus ambushed his father Uranus, who had been imprisoning their children inside the earth, and castrated him with a sickle, an act that ended Uranus's reign and let Cronus take power as king of the Titans, ruling over the Golden Age Greek tradition remembered as a time of abundance without toil. Fearing a prophecy that one of his own children would depose him just as he had deposed his father, Cronus swallowed each child born to him and his sister wife Rhea as soon as it was born, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon in turn, until Rhea, desperate to save her sixth child, hid the infant Zeus on Crete and tricked Cronus into swallowing a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes instead. Zeus grew up in secret and eventually returned to force Cronus to disgorge his siblings, then led them in the ten year Titanomachy that overthrew Cronus and the Titans who had sided with him, after which Zeus and his brothers imprisoned most of the defeated Titans in Tartarus.