Titans today
Titan is a large moon of Saturn, and a noun (titan) or adjective (titanic) meaning ‘almost superhuman’. The strength of the Titans gave its name to the very strong metal titanium, and to the Titanic – a ship somewhat less strong than believed. The name was also used for a long-serving series of space rockets.
Monstrous offspring
Other children of Gaia and Uranus included the one-eyed race of Cyclopes, and the gigantic and terrible Hecatoncheires, each of which had fifty heads and one hundred arms and hands (Hecatoncheires means ‘hundred-handers’). These latter creatures had considerable potential for trouble, and in some versions of the tale Uranus had them cast into Tartarus. Others claim that Uranus refused to let the monsters be born at all, keeping them confined in the womb of Gaia beneath the earth, never to directly trouble the world of men.
Gaia took a dim view of Uranus’ treatment of their children, and decided it was time to do something about it. The Time in question was her youngest son Cronos, with whose birth chronology as we know it came into the universe. And just as time has a way of passing unnoticed for those having fun, so too did Cronos take Uranus unawares while he lay with Gaia and castrated him with a deft stroke of an adamantine sickle thoughtfully provided by his mother.
The discarded genitals fell into the waters and there seeded the birth of Aphrodite, the oldest of the deities who were to become the ‘Olympians’. ‘She is called Aphrodite as she was born in foam [Aphros] … and Eros attended her birth along with sweet Desire, and they took her to the family of the gods, and to her allotted place in the whisperings of girls, the smiles, deceptions and the delectable tenderness of intimacy among humans and among the immortal gods’ – so Hesiod tells us.
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later art and culture:
the birth of aphrodite
The legend of the birth of Aphrodite (known to the Romans as Venus) inspired in the 1480s one of the best-known works of Renaissance art – Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, showing the goddess as she emerges from the waters. ‘Venus’ may be modelled on the beautiful courtesan Simonetta – especially as the seashell in Renaissance Italy was a metaphor for that part of the body that Venus conceals in the painting.
Botticelli’s version of Aphrodite’s birth.
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Winged sleep and death carry off a mortally wounded hero (Attic vase c. 510 bc).
The Children of the Night
For those who wonder where ‘sweet Desire’ had come from to assist at the birth of Aphrodite, the answer is that Nyx had been busy as well. Desire was one of the more pleasant of a decidedly mixed bag of Nyx’s children, which included Geras (Old Age), Hypnos (Sleep), Thanatos (Death), Eris (Discord) and Nemesis (Retribution), as well as the dread Moirai, or Fates, who wove the destiny of men and gods alike.
Step 3
The Neoptolemus Principle
and the Birth of Zeus
The Neoptolemus Principle dictates that the harm a man has done will in turn be done to him. The Greeks took this almost as a law of nature and named it after a son of Achilles who was killed as brutally as he had slain many others. Although Neoptolemus himself lived much later, the principle at work can be seen even at this early stage in the attack on Uranus. Gaia and Uranus continued to consort, but the castrated Uranus ceased to interact meaningfully with the universe, and soon dropped from the record. Gaia too stepped into the background. In fact, she became and remains the background itself.
Cronos and Rhea
Cronos led a new generation of gods, taking as his consort his sister Rhea. Rhea is a minor character in Greek myth, but came back strongly in Roman religion as the Magna Mater, the Great Mother, being as she was the mother or grandmother of the Olympian gods. In the modern world Rhea is the largest of the moons of Saturn. This is appropriate, since for the Romans Cronos (with a touch of Hades) became Saturn, an agricultural god who is today worshipped as Saturday (Saturn’s day).
Several significant women in early Roman myth were called Rhea. Rhea Silva was the mother of Romulus and Remus, and another Rhea was the mother of Aventius (with Heracles), after whom the Aventine Hill of Rome is named.
Sadly for Gaia, Cronos decided that, upon mature reflection, it might be better if her monstrous offspring stayed imprisoned in Tartarus. Having started along illiberal lines, Cronos remained consistent. He knew full well that Nemesis was already on his case after the castration of his father, and that the Neoptolemus Principle meant that he, in his turn, was likely to suffer at the hands of one of his children.
The (un)birth of the Olympians
Cronos attempted to avert retribution by his children for the attack on his own father, but since gods are immortal, killing his offspring was not an option. Uranus’ experience suggested that stuffing them back into their mother did not work, so Cronos took matters into his own hands – indeed into his own stomach – by swallowing his children as they were born; a metaphysical reflection of the fact that in the long run, Time does indeed swallow up all his children.
Cronos receives a stone, instead of Zeus.
However, in attempting to avoid his father’s example, Cronos still committed the identical error of not considering the maternal instincts of his wife. Like Gaia, Rhea was angered by the fate of her children, and like Gaia, she was prepared to do something about it.
Baby Zeus suckled by Amalthea, from the bas-relief of an ancient altar.
The birth of Zeus
Like any good Greek girl in all the ages to come, Rhea turned to her mother for advice. Gaia advised her daughter to come home. And so, when Rhea’s pregnancy with her youngest came to term, she returned to the earth. And here Zeus was born, possibly at Lyktos, or maybe Mt Ida, or maybe Mt Dikte, but certainly in Crete. When Cronos duly turned up to swallow the newborn, he was given instead a large lump of Cretan stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. And so Cronos went away believing that he had consumed the latest of his children, while Gaia carried off Zeus, her grandchild, to be raised in secrecy, fed by the honey of the wild bees and nourished by the milk of Amalthea, one of the first goats ever to be.
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later art and culture:
the birth of zeus
The great Flemish artist Rubens based many paintings on mythological themes. In Roman mythology it was Saturn who fathered Zeus (Jupiter) and consumed his other children, and Rubens’ Saturn, 1636, is a horrifying picture of a man tearing a living child with his teeth. This theme developed into one of black insanity in the early 1820s with Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring One of his Sons. By contrast, the escape of Zeus was charmingly depicted in 1615 by the Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini in a small marble sculpture called The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun.
Goya’s nightmarish vision of Cronos.
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Heavenly wars: the Titanic struggle
Though Zeus was quietly growing into his power away from his father’s watchful gaze, Cronos was both powerful and crafty: if he were to be overthrown, Zeus would need allies. And so Gaia inveigled Cronos into regurgitating Zeus’ brothers and sisters, from last to first – and as soon as Cronos vomited the stone he had believed to be Zeus, the game was up. Zeus freed the imprisoned sons of Gaia from Tartarus and Cronos called upon his brothers and sisters, the Titans, to defend his reign. War commenced in heaven and mighty was the struggle, which, according to Hesiod, for ten years ‘made the vault of heaven shake and groan and the earth and boundless seas threw back the echoing roar; high Olympus was shaken to its base and the earthquakes came in endless succession’. But eventually Cronos was defeated, and the Titans who had fought with him were imprisoned in Tartarus.