Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [95]
Resentful and in pain, Gaia wants the children to “do in” dear old dad. But only Cronus, the youngest Titan, has the right stuff. Gaia gives Cronus a sickle with which to attack Uranus in a moment of treacherous surprise that may have left the men in Hesiod’s audience feeling a bit uncomfortable: “From ambush Cronus’ left hand seized the genital parts of his father; he reached out his right with the sickle, saw-toothed, deadly and sharp. Like a reaper, he sliced away the genitals of his own father.”
As Hesiod tells it, these severed genitals were then carried out to the ocean, where sea foam magically mixed with Uranus’s blood and semen, to create Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love, who emerged from the sea. (There is another, later and different, version of Aphrodite’s birth.)
Having emasculated his father, Cronus frees his Titan siblings from their cave inside Gaia and becomes king of the gods. (Again, this parallels the Mesopotamian Creation myth, in which the primordial sea god Apsu had been overthrown by one of his offspring, Enki.) During Cronus’s reign, the work of creating the world continued and hundreds more divinities were born, including more Titans, such as Atlas and Prometheus, the gods or goddesses of death, the rainbow, the rivers, and sleep—their names meticulously catalogued by Hesiod. And as we read them, we can only imagine the singer—perhaps accompanying himself on a lyre—crooning these names at a wedding feast, in celebration of the glorious divinities.
The eager crowd is now primed. The stage is set for the entrance of some of the most pivotal and familiar figures in Greek myth—the Olympians—some of whom will descend from Cronus. Knowing how he had deposed his own father, Cronus fears that the offspring of his marriage to this sister Rhea may do the same, so he swallows his first five children as soon as their mother delivers them. To save her sixth child, Rhea tricks Cronus into swallowing a stone wrapped in baby clothes, and then hides the infant in a cave on the island of Crete, where he is raised by nymphs on goat’s milk and honey.* Fearful that Cronus might hear the infant’s crying, Rhea orders a group of semidivine men to dance around noisily at the entrance to the cave in which he is hidden. That child, saved by Rhea, is Zeus.
The most powerful of all the Greek deities, Zeus will rise to lord over the pantheon of Greek gods. But first he must prove himself worthy. His trials begin when he returns to challenge his father’s supremacy and rescue his siblings—an instant replay of Cronus’s battle with his own father, Uranus. With Rhea’s aid, he first tricks Cronus into drinking a liquid that makes him vomit up all five children, plus Rhea’s stone. Zeus then frees the fearsome Cyclopes, still trapped within the earth, and they make magical weapons for Zeus and his two brothers, including the great three-pronged spear, or trident, for Poseidon; a helmet of invisibility for Hades; and the thunderbolts that becomes Zeus’s awesome weapon and symbol of power. Zeus also frees the fearsome Hecatonchires from the depths of Tartarus, where they have been imprisoned. Though Gaia, the Mother Earth, urges the Titans to accept Zeus as the supreme god, most of them refuse, and an epic ten-year war—the Titanomachy—follows. Ultimately, Zeus and his siblings, along with their allies, prevail over the Titans, who are exiled to the depths of Tartarus.
Of the defeated Titans, only the one named Atlas receives a different fate. He is condemned by Zeus to live at the edge of the world, where he must hold up the heavens and continue the separation of sky and earth for all eternity. (The Atlas Mountains in Morocco near the Atlantic Ocean are supposedly where Atlas is forced to stand. And when a map-maker created a collection of the maps of the known world in 1570 CE, he called it an “atlas,” in his honor.)
But Zeus’s work is not done. Before he can fully assert his rule, Zeus must also defeat a race of Giants—born from the blood spilled