Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Before the familiar Hesiodic succession, another archaic strand remembered a first pair who held Olympus: Ophion (Ophioneus)—a serpent or serpent-named primordial—and Eurynome, daughter of Oceanus. In the song Apollonius gives Orpheus aboard the Argo, these two ruled on snowy Olympus until Cronus and Rhea, by main force and thunder, cast them down into the waves of Ocean; Eurynome and Ophion yielded the throne, and Cronus thereafter reigned over the Titans’ generation. Pherecydes of Syros, in related early theological speculation, knows an Ophioneus against whom Cronus fights—a parallel memory of a snake-shaped or snake-named predecessor. The strand does not replace Hesiod’s Chaos–Gaia–Uranus cosmogony; it sits beside it as an alternative charter of who first held the mountain of the gods. Catalogue it as the Orphic/Apollonian Ophion–Eurynome rule, distinct from Uranus’s castration, the Titanomachy, and Hesiod’s Oceanid Eurynome who bears the Charites to Zeus.