In an ancient myth recorded by Hesiod's Theogony, Cronus envied the power of his father, Uranus, the ruler of the universe.

In some authors, a different divine pair, Ophion and Eurynome, a daughter of Oceanus, were said to have ruled Mount Olympus in the early age of the Titans.

[6] After securing his place as the new king of gods, Cronus learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own children, just as he had overthrown his father.

As a result, although he sired the gods Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon by Rhea, he devoured them all as soon as they were born to prevent the prophecy.

When the sixth child, Zeus, was born, Rhea sought Gaia to devise a plan to save them and to eventually get retribution on Cronus for his acts against his father and children.

According to some versions of the story, he was then raised by a goat named Amalthea, while a company of Curetes, armored male dancers, shouted and clapped their hands to make enough noise to mask the baby's cries from Cronus.

[12] In a vast war called the Titanomachy, Zeus and his older brothers and sisters, with the help of the Hecatoncheires and Cyclopes, overthrew Cronus and the other Titans.

In two papyrus versions of a passage from Hesiod's Works and Days, however, Kronos rules over the Isle of the Blessed, having been released from Tartarus by Zeus.

However, at Dodona, Rhea secretly bears her sons Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades and sends them to Phrygia to be raised in the care of three Cretans.

[23]The poet Pindar, in one of his poems (462 BC), wrote that although Atlas still "strains against the weight of the sky ... Zeus freed the Titans",[24] and in another poem (476 BC), Pindar has Cronus released from Tartarus and now ruling in the Isles of the Blessed, a mythical land where the Greek heroes reside in the afterlife:[25] Those who have persevered three times, on either side, to keep their souls free from all wrongdoing, follow Zeus's road to the end, to the tower of Cronus, where ocean breezes blow around the island of the blessed, and flowers of gold are blazing, some from splendid trees on land, while water nurtures others.

With these wreaths and garlands of flowers they entwine their hands according to the righteous counsels of Rhadamanthys, whom the great father, the husband of Rhea whose throne is above all others, keeps close beside him as his partner.

Cronus gave his daughter two eggs smeared with his own semen and told her to bury them underground, so that they would produce a creature capable of dethroning Zeus.

[38] In the dialogue, Cronus rejects the Hesiodic tradition of him eating his children and then being overthrown, and instead claims that he peacefully abdicated the throne in favour of his youngest son Zeus, although he still resumes rulership for seven days each year (his festival) in order to remind humanity of the plenteous, toil-free and luxuriant life they enjoyed under his reign before the Olympians took over.

[47] The Gnostic text Pistis Sophia (3rd–4th century) references the name Cronus, portraying the deity as a great ruler over others within the aeons.

Recently, Janda (2010) offers a genuinely Indo-European etymology of "the cutter", from the root *(s)ker- "to cut" (Greek κείρω (keirō), cf.

[52] A theory debated in the 19th century, and sometimes still offered somewhat apologetically,[53] holds that Κρόνος is related to "horned", assuming a Semitic derivation from qrn.

[54] Andrew Lang's objection, that Cronus was never represented horned in Hellenic art,[55] was addressed by Robert Brown,[56] arguing that, in Semitic usage, as in the Hebrew Bible, qeren was a signifier of "power".

[58] Philo's account, ascribed by Eusebius to the semi-legendary pre-Trojan War Phoenician historian Sanchuniathon, indicates that Cronus was originally a Canaanite ruler who founded Byblos and was subsequently deified.

This version gives his alternate name as Elus or Ilus, and states that in the 32nd year of his reign, he emasculated, slew and deified his father Epigeius or Autochthon "whom they afterwards called Uranus".

It further states that after ships were invented, Cronus, visiting the 'inhabitable world', bequeathed Attica to his own daughter Athena, and Egypt to Taautus the son of Misor and inventor of writing.

[59] While the Greeks considered Cronus a cruel and tempestuous force of chaos and disorder, believing the Olympian gods had brought an era of peace and order by seizing power from the crude and malicious Titans,[citation needed] the Romans took a more positive and innocuous view of the deity, by conflating their indigenous deity Saturn with Cronus.

Nevertheless, among Hellenistic scholars in Alexandria and during the Renaissance, Cronus was conflated with the name of Chronos, the personification of "Father Time",[40] wielding the harvesting scythe.

This equation is particularly well attested in Tebtunis in the southern Fayyum: Geb and Cronus were here part of a local version of the cult of Sobek, the crocodile god.