Why did Kronos eat his children?

A prophecy in the family

Kronos came to power by force: Hesiod says he attacked his father, Sky, with a sickle and took his throne. He married his sister Rhea. Then he learned from Earth and Sky “that he was destined to be overcome by his own son” (Theogony 463–464), and he swallowed each child as it came. Hesiod’s motive is power, not hunger. Kronos acted so “that no other of the proud sons of Heaven should hold the kingly office” among the gods (461–462).

The fear runs in the family. Sky had pushed his children back inside Earth. Kronos swallows his. And Zeus, once he is king, swallows his first wife, Metis, when he is told that her son would one day rule the gods (Theogony 886–900). Each king tries to stop the next one from being born.

Five children and a stone

The five swallowed were Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. Hestia came first, so she was the last to be brought back up; a Homeric hymn calls her “the first-born child of wily Cronos and youngest too” (Hymn to Aphrodite 21–23). Before her sixth birth, Rhea begged her own parents for a plan. They sent her to Crete, where Earth hid the newborn in a cave, and Rhea played the trick that saved him:

to the mightily ruling son of Heaven, the earlier king of the gods, she gave a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Then he took it in his hands and thrust it down into his belly: wretch! he knew not in his heart that in place of the stone his son was left behind, unconquered and untroubled

Later writers fill in the Cretan childhood. A goat named Amalthea feeds the baby, and armed young men called Curetes clash their spears on their shields so his father cannot hear him cry (Apollodorus 1.1.6–7).

How the children came back

Zeus grew up fast. In Hesiod, Earth tricks Kronos into bringing up everything he had swallowed, “first the stone which he had swallowed last” (Theogony 497). Apollodorus gives the credit to Metis, who slipped him a drug (1.2.1). Out came Zeus’s brothers and sisters, grown and unharmed, ready for the war against the Titans.

Zeus planted the stone at Delphi as a sign for mortals. Nearly 900 years after Hesiod, the travel writer Pausanias saw a small stone there that the keepers anointed with olive oil every day and dressed in unspun wool at festivals. People said it was the very one Kronos swallowed (Pausanias 10.24.6).

What the story means

Hesiod tells a myth about power: a king who devours the future to protect the present. Ancient allegorists, and Romans such as Cicero, who knew Kronos as Saturn, read it differently, as time consuming its own years, a mix-up with the Greek word for time explained in Kronos and Chronos. Oddly, Hesiod also remembers the same reign as a golden age: the first race of mortals “lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven” (Works and Days 111).

Francisco Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son around 1820 on a wall of his own house near Madrid; it now hangs in the Prado. It is the version most people picture. Hesiod’s ends differently, with a mother’s trick and a stone at Delphi.