Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

After Earth had brought forth Heaven, Hills, and Sea alone, she lay with Heaven (Uranus) and bore the generation later called Titans: deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, gold-crowned Phoebe, and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronus the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty father. Again Earth bore to Heaven the Cyclopes—overbearing in spirit: Brontes, Steropes, and stubborn-hearted Arges—who in all else were like the gods, but one eye only was set in the midst of their foreheads. Strength, might, and craft were in their works; later tradition remembers them as the makers of Zeus’s thunder and thunderbolt. Again three other sons were born of Earth and Heaven, great beyond telling: Cottus, Briareos (also called Obriareus), and Gyes—the Hecatoncheires (Hundred-Handers). From their shoulders sprang a hundred arms, and each had fifty heads upon their strong limbs; irresistible was the strength in their great forms. Of all the children of Earth and Heaven these were the most terrible, and their own father hated them from the first. Uranus used to hide them all away in a secret place of Earth as soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light; and Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing. Vast Earth groaned within, being straitened. She made the element of grey flint and shaped a great sickle, and told her plan to her dear sons, urging them to punish the vile outrage of their father, who first thought of doing shameful things. Fear seized them all, and none uttered a word—except great Cronus the wily, who took courage and answered that he would undertake the deed, for he did not reverence their father of evil name. Vast Earth rejoiced and set him in an ambush, put the jagged sickle in his hands, and revealed the whole plot. Heaven came, bringing on night and longing for love, and lay about Earth spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and with his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father’s members and cast them away to fall behind him. The bloody drops that gushed forth Earth received, and as the seasons moved round she bore from that blood the strong Erinyes (Furies), the great Giants with gleaming armour and long spears, and the Nymphs called Meliae (ash-tree nymphs) all over the boundless earth. As soon as Cronus had cut off the members with flint and cast them from the land into the surging sea, they were swept away over the main a long time. A white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden—Aphrodite—whose birth and epithets are told in full in the separate foam-birth entry. But these sons whom he himself had begotten great Heaven used to call Titans (Strainers) in reproach, saying that they strained and did a fearful deed presumptuously, and that vengeance for it would come afterwards. With Uranus mutilated and thrust apart from Earth, Cronus succeeds to the kingship among the gods—setting the stage for his own fearful reign and the prophecy that a son would overthrow him in turn.