One Scene, Two Tellings

Later Greek mythography returned to this scene and filled in detail Hesiod's own telling leaves bare. The Library, a systematic handbook of Greek myth attributed to Apollodorus and compiled centuries after Hesiod, names all six of Cronus and Rhea's children in the order he swallows them, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon, before recounting how Rhea, pregnant with Zeus, hides the birth in Crete and hands Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes in the infant's place. Comparing the two accounts shows a pattern common across Greek myth, an early poetic version stating a core action and its motive in compressed form, and a later prose handbook expanding that same action into a fuller narrative with names, places and a specific trick supplied. What the two versions agree on matters as much as where they differ, since both make Cronus's fear of the very prophecy he is trying to escape the direct cause of the act that dooms him, and both make Rhea's deception of her own husband the hinge on which the next generation of gods, and Zeus's eventual kingship, depends. Where the two accounts part ways is scale and purpose. Hesiod's five compressed lines serve a poem tracing the succession of divine generations from Chaos to Zeus, while Apollodorus writes centuries later, drawing together many local and sometimes conflicting versions of Greek myth into one continuous reference narrative, so the added names and the stone trick read less as invention than as the kind of specifying detail a systematic handbook is built to supply.