In Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Electra calls upon Kratos, Dike ("Justice"), and Zeus to aid her brother Orestes in avenging the murder of their father Agamemnon.

Kratos and Bia appear in a late fifth-century BC red-figure Attic skyphos of the punishment of Ixion, possibly based on a scene from a lost tragedy by Euripides.

Kratos and his siblings are first mentioned in the Theogony, which was composed by the Boeotian poet Hesiod in the late eighth or early seventh century BC.

[7][8][9] Hesiod states: "And Styx the daughter of Ocean was joined to Pallas and bore Zelus (Emulation) and trim-ankled Nike (Victory) in the house.

[10][8] According to Diana Burton, Styx, Zelos, Nike, Kratos, and Bia's voluntary change in allegiance represents the certainty of Zeus' victory over the Titans.

[15] Kratos in particular represents what Ian Ruffell calls "the kind of uncomplicated thug for whom despotic regimes offer countless job opportunities.

[7] Kratos regards justice (δίκη; dikê) as a system of cosmic hierarchy in which the monarch, Zeus, decides who receives which privileges and who does not.

[16] In Aeschylus' Libation Bearers, Electra invokes Kratos, Dike, and Zeus to support her and her brother Orestes' quest to avenge the murder of their father Agamemnon by their mother Clytemnestra.

[29][32] The vase is in the private collection of Herbert Cahn in Basel, Switzerland, and only a bit of hair belonging to Kratos is still visible on the remaining fragments.

[32] H. A. Shapiro conjectures that this is probably a representation of a scene from the lost tragedy Ixion by Euripides, who likely borrowed the figures of Kratos and Bia from Prometheus Bound.

[36] In the preface to his Fabulae, the Roman author Gaius Julius Hyginus describes Potestas (Power) as being among the offspring of Pallas and Styx.

[40] Richard Porson's 1795 translation of Prometheus Bound was illustrated with drawings by John Flaxman showing the famous binding scene.

[2][44][45] The character is portrayed as what classical scholar Sylwia Chmielewski calls "a deeply tragic, Herculean anti-hero who, after murdering his family, has to wash away the miasma to regain his peace of mind.

[3][46] Stig Asmussen, the director of 2010's God of War III, called the naming coincidence a "happy mistake",[46] noting that the Kratos in the game and the one in Prometheus Bound are both "pawns".

[46] Zoran Iovanovici of California State University, Long Beach observed with irony that, while the mythological Kratos is best known for chaining Prometheus, in 2007's God of War II, the video game character releases him.