The short answer
No. Kronos is the Titan, father of Zeus; chronos is the ordinary Greek word for time. The names are spelled differently in Greek, Κρόνος and χρόνος, but they sound alike, and even ancient writers blended them. That mix-up is why Father Time carries a blade like the sickle Kronos used against his father.
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Two words that only sound alike
In Greek the Titan is Kronos, spelled with a kappa: Κρόνος. Time is chronos, with a chi: χρόνος. One is a name; the other is a common noun, the one behind chronology, chronic, chronicle and synchronize. Hesiod, who tells Kronos’s story around 700 BC, never links him with time, and no one knows for sure what the name Kronos means. Many books, Herald among them, spell the Titan with a K to keep the two apart.
A few early thinkers did make Time a god. The philosopher Pherecydes of Syros and the Orphic poems placed Chronos among the first powers of the universe, a different being from the Titan who fathered Zeus.
How the ancients mixed them up
The blending is ancient. Stoic philosophers liked to read myths as coded lessons about nature, and they explained Kronos as Chronos: a father who swallows his children is time, which consumes everything it brings into being. Cicero passed the idea to Latin readers in On the Nature of the Gods (2.64), adding that Saturn got his name because he was saturated with years. Once Kronos and Saturn counted as one god, the father who swallowed his children became a picture of time itself. Ovid’s phrase tempus edax rerum, time the devourer of things (Metamorphoses 15.234), belongs to the same way of thinking.
Why Father Time carries a sickle
Kronos had a real blade. Hesiod says Earth made a great sickle of grey flint and put it in his hands for the attack on his father (Theogony 160–175). The Romans’ Saturn was also an old god of sowing and harvest, shown with a curved blade. Medieval and Renaissance artists fused Saturn with Time, and the result is the figure still seen in New Year’s cartoons: Father Time, old and bearded, with a scythe, often an hourglass and sometimes wings. The art historian Erwin Panofsky traced this merger in a famous essay, “Father Time” (1939).
So the swallowing father of Goya’s painting and the gentle old man of New Year’s Eve share an ancestor, and a pun.
Saturn, Saturday and the planet
Rome made Kronos Saturn, and Saturn left marks everywhere. Saturday is Saturni dies, Saturn’s day, the one English weekday that kept a Roman god’s name. The planet Saturn, the slowest of the five wandering stars the ancients knew, takes about 29 and a half years to circle the Sun, a fitting pace for a god later tied to time. Its largest moon is called Titan.
Each December the Romans held the Saturnalia, days of feasting, gifts and role reversal that recalled a golden age when Saturn ruled in Italy. And saturnine, a word from astrology, still means gloomy, as people born under Saturn were supposed to be. For the whole family of Roman names, from Jupiter to Pluto, see the full list.
Sources
- Hesiod, Theogony 137–138, 154–182, 453–506 (tr. H. G. Evelyn-White, 1914)
- Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.64
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.234
- Erwin Panofsky, “Father Time,” in Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939)