by Stephen Fry
Catching her breath and rising from her bed, Rhea slipped down the mountainside and made her way to Crete, traveling as fast as anyone could in so heavily pregnant a state.
Kronos receives the Omphalos stone from Rhea.
THE CRETAN CHILD
Rhea’s accouchement on Crete was easy enough. Tenderly assisted by the she-goat and the Meliae she prepared to give birth in the safety and comfort of a cave on Mount Ida. Soon she was delivered of a quite transcendently beautiful baby boy. She named him ZEUS.
Just as Gaia had recruited her youngest child Kronos in order to take revenge on her son and husband Ouranos, so Rhea vowed she would rear this, her youngest child, to destroy her husband and brother Kronos. The dreadful cycle of bloodlust, greed, and killing that marked the birth pangs of the primordial world would continue into the next generation.
Rhea knew she must return to Mount Othrys before Kronos noticed her absence and suspected that something was wrong. As had been arranged, the goat Amalthea would suckle the baby with her rich and nutritious milk while the Meliae would feed him on the sweet and wholesome manna that wept its gum from their ash trees. In this way young Zeus could grow up on Crete strong and well nourished. Rhea would visit him as often as was possible, to tutor him in the arts of revenge.
Although this is the best-known version, there are many different accounts as to how Zeus escaped the attention of the great Kronos, god of earth, sky, and seas. One records that a nymph named ADAMANTHEA suspended the infant Zeus by rope from a tree. Strung up between earth, sea, and sky he remained in this way invisible to his father. It is a pleasingly Daliesque image—the baby who would become the mightiest of all beings gurgling, babbling, and chuckling in midair, hanging between the elements over which he was destined to rule.
THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE
While, unknown to his father, Zeus grew strong on goat’s milk and manna in Crete and learned to walk, talk, and understand the world around him, Kronos summoned his Titan siblings to Mount Othrys to renew their pledges of loyalty and obedience.
“This is our world now,” he told them. “Fate has decreed that I must be childless, the better to rule. But you must do your duty. Breed! Fill the world with our Titan race. Bring them up to obey me in all things and I will grant you lands and provinces of your own. Now, bow before me.”
The Titans bowed low and Kronos gave a grunt of satisfaction that was the closest he ever came to an expression of happiness. The vengeful prophecy of his father had been averted; the eternal Age of the Titans could begin.
The infant Zeus being fed by nymphs and the she-goat Amalthea on Crete.
THE CRETAN BOY
Kronos may have grunted with satisfaction, but Moros, the figuration of Destiny and Doom, smiled—as he always does when the powerful exhibit confidence. On this occasion Moros smiled because he could see that Zeus was flourishing on Crete. He was growing into the strongest and most striking male in all creation—indeed his radiance had become almost painful to look upon.18 The goodness of goat’s milk and the nurturing potency of manna had given him strong bones, a clear complexion, sparkling eyes, and glossy hair. He made the journey, to use the Greek terms, from pais (boy) and ephebos (teenager) to kouros (youth) and thence into a fine example of what we might call today a young adult. Even now the first downy outlines of what was to become a legendary and mighty example of the art of the beard were showing themselves on his chin and cheeks.19 He possessed the confidence, the unforced air of command, which marks those destined to lead. He was quicker to laughter than anger, but when his ire was roused he could frighten every living creature within his orbit.
From the first he exhibited a blend of zest for life and strength of will that filled even his mother with awe, and some attested that Amalthea’s milk conferred extraordinary capabilities on the youth as he grew. To this day Cretan guides entertain visitors with tales of the young Zeus’s remarkable powers. They tell the story (as if it happened within their lifetimes) of how, as an infant playing with his beloved nanny-goat and unaware of his own strength, Zeus accidentally snapped off one of her horns.20 By virtue of his already prodigious divine powers, this broken horn instantly filled itself with the most delicious food—fresh bread, vegetables, fruit, cured meats, and smoked fish—a supply that never gave out no matter how much was taken from it. Thus originated the celebrated Horn of Plenty, the CORNUCOPIA.
Zeus’s determined mother visited Crete whenever she felt able to slip away from the ever-watchful Kronos.
“Never forget what your father did. He ate your brothers and sisters. He tried to eat you. He is your enemy.”
Zeus would listen as Rhea described the unhappy condition of the world under Kronos.
“He rules by fear. He has no sense of loyalty or trust. This is not the way, my Zeus.”
“Doesn’t that make him strong?”
“No! It makes him weak. The Titans are his family, his brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces. Already some are beginning to resent his monstrous tyranny. When your time comes you will exploit that resentment.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“A true leader forges alliances. A true leader is admired and trusted.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“A true leader is loved.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Ah, you laugh at me, but it is true.”
“Yes, M—”
Rhea slapped her son.
“Be serious. You are no fool, I can see that for myself. Adamanthea tells me that you are intelligent, but impetuous. That you spend too much time hunting wolves, teasing the sheep, climbing trees, seducing the ash-tree nymphs. It is time you were properly schooled. You are sixteen now and soon we must make our move.”
“Yes, Mother.”
THE OCEANID AND THE POTION
Rhea asked her friend Metis, wise and beautiful daughter of Tethys and Oceanus, to prepare her son for what was to come.
“He is clever, but wayward and rash. Teach him patience, craft, and guile.”
Zeus was captivated by Metis from the start. He had never seen such beauty. The Titaness was a little smaller than most of her race, but endowed with a grace and gravity that made her shine. The step of a deer and the guile of a fox, the power of a lion, the softness of a dove, all allied to a presence and force of mind that sent the boy dizzy.
“Lie down with me.”
“No. We shall go for a walk. I have many things to say to you.”
“Here. On the grass.”
Metis smiled and took his hand. “We have work to do, Zeus.”
“But I love you.”
“Then you will do as I say. When we love someone, we always want to please them do we not?”
“Don’t you love me?”
Metis laughed, though in truth she was astounded by the halo of glamour and charisma that radiated from this bold and handsome youth. But her friend Rhea had asked her to undertake his education and Metis was never one to betray a trust.
For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others.
Her refusal to allow their relationship to take on a physical dimension only made Zeus love her more. Although she never told him so, Metis returned the love. As a result there existed a kind of crackle in the air whenever the two were close.
One day Zeus saw Metis standing over a large boulder and bashing its flat surface with a small round-ended stone.
“What on earth are you doing?”
“Crushing mustard seeds and crystals of salt.”
“Of course you are.”
“Today,” said Metis, “is your seventeenth birthday. You are ready to go to Othrys and fulfill your destiny. Rhea will be here soon, but first I must finish a little preparation of my own devising.”
“What’s in that jar?”
“In here there is a mixture of poppy juice and copper sulphate, sweetened with a syrup of manna provided by the Meliae, our friends of the ash tree. I’ll put all the ingredients together and shake them up. Like so.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look, here is your mother. She will explain.”
As Metis looked on, Rhea outlined the plan to Zeus. Mother and son gazed deep into each other’s eyes, took a deep breath and swore an oath, son to mother, mother to son. They were ready.
REBIRTH OF THE FIVE
Midnight. The thick cloth that Erebus and Nyx threw across earth, sea, and sky to mark the end of Hemera’s and Aether’s diurnal round blanketed the world. In a valley high up on Mount Othrys, the Lord of All paced alone, banging his chest, restless and miserable. Kronos had grown into the most foul-tempered and discontented Titan of all. Power over everything gave him no satisfaction. Since Rhea had—without explanation—banned him from the conjugal bed, sleep had been a stranger to him too. Denied its healing balm, his mood and digestion, neither good at the best of times, had worsened. The last of the babies he had swallowed seemed to have provoked a sharp acid reflux that the previous five had not. Where was the joy in omnipotence when his stomach griped and his thoughts stumbled blindly in the thick fog of insomnia?
His heart lifted to a state approaching something like happiness, however, when he heard, unexpectedly, the sound of Rhea’s low sweet voice humming gently to herself as she came up the slope toward the mountaintop. Loveliest sister and dearest wife! It was quite natural that she had been a little upset by his consumption of their six children, but she surely understood that he had had no choice. She was a Titan, she knew about duty and destiny. He called out to her.
“Rhea?”
“Kronos! Awake at this hour?”
“I have been awake for more days and nights than I can count. Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me. Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” Macbeth, another murderer deprived of sleep and plagued by dark prophesies, was to say the same thing, but not for many years yet.
“Oh tush, my love. Cannot the wit and craft of a Titaness surpass those silly sleep demons? There is nothing Hypnos and Morpheus can do to soothe your aching body, to calm your racing mind, to ease your wounded spirit, that I cannot match with something sweet and warm of my own.”
“Your sweet warm lips! Your sweet warm thighs! Your sweet warm—”
“Those in time, impatient lord! But first, I have brought you a present. A lovely boy to be your cupbearer.”
From the recess stepped Zeus, a radiant smile lighting up his handsome face. He bowed and proffered Kronos a jewelled goblet which the Titan snatched greedily.
“Pretty, very pretty. I might try him later,” he said casting an admiring eye over Zeus and drinking down the contents of the goblet in one greedy draft. “But Rhea, it is you that I love.”
It was too dark for him to see that Rhea had hoisted one eyebrow into an arch of contemptuous incredulity.
“You love me?” she hissed. “You? Love? Me? You, who ate all but one of my darling children? You dare talk to me of love?” Kronos gave an unhappy hiccup. He was undergoing the strangest sensations. He frowned and tried to focus. What was Rhea saying? It could not be that she no longer loved him. His mind was even more foggy and his stomach even more turbulent than usual. What was wrong with him? Oh, and there was something else she had said. Something that made no sense at all.
“What do you mean,” he asked in a voice thick with confusion and nausea, “by saying that I ate ‘all but one’ of your children? I ate all of them. I distinctly remember.”
A strong young voice cracked through the night air like a whip. “Not quite all, Father!”
Kronos, the nausea rising in an alarming surge, turned in shock to see the young cupbearer step from the shadows.
“Who . . . who . . . whooooooooo!” Kronos’s question turned into a sudden uprush of uncontrollable vomiting. From his gut, in one heaving spasm, erupted a large stone. The linen in which it was once wrapped had long since been dissolved by stomach acid. Kronos gazed at it stupidly, his eyes swimming and his face white. But before he could understand what he was seeing he was assailed by that horrible and unmistakable feeling that tells a vomiter there is more to come. Far more.
Zeus leapt fleetly forward, picked up the regurgitated boulder and hurled it far, far away, much as Kronos had once flung Ouranos’s genitals far, far away from the exact same spot. We will find out later where it landed and what happened.
Inside Kronos the compound of salt, mustard, and ipecacuanha continued to do its emetic work.21 One by one he spewed up the five children he had swallowed. First out was Hera.22 Then came Poseidon, Demeter, Hades, and finally Hestia, before the tormented Titan collapsed in a paroxysm of exhausted panting.
If you recall, Metis’s potion also included a quantity of poppy juice. This immediately began to take somniferous effect. Letting out one last great rumbling groan, Kronos rolled over and fell into a deep, deep sleep.
With a cry of exultation Zeus bent over his snoring father to grasp the great sickle and administer the coup de grâce. He would sever Kronos’s head in one blow and raise it up in triumph before the world, creating a victorious tableau that would never be forgotten and that artists would depict until the end of time. But the scythe, forged by Gaia for Kronos, could not be used against him. Powerful as Zeus was, he was unable even to pick it up. He tried once, but it felt as if it was fixed to the ground.
“Gaia gave it to him and only Gaia can take it away from him,” said Rhea. “Let it be.”
“But I must kill him,” said Zeus. “We must be revenged.”
“His mother Earth protects him. Do not anger her. You will need her in the time to come. You will have your revenge.”
Zeus gave up his attempts to move the scythe. It was vexing that he could not behead his hated father as he lay there snoring like a pig, but his mother was right. It could wait. There was too much to celebrate.
In the starlight over Mount Othrys he and his five liberated siblings laughed and stamped and hooted and howled with delight. Their mother laughed too, clapping her hands with joy to see her radiant sons and daughters so well and so happy, out in the world at last and ready to claim their inheritance. Each of the five rescued ones took it in turn to embrace Zeus, their youngest but now eldest brother, their savior and their leader. They swore allegiance to him forever. Together they would overthrow Kronos and his whole ugly race and establish a new order . . .
They would not, despite their parentage, call themselves “Titans.” They would be gods. And not just gods, but the gods.
3. The brontosaurus or “thunder lizard” got his name from Brontes. The novelist sisters from Yorkshire may have too. Their father was born ‘Brunty’ but changed it to Brontë, perhaps to lend a grand peal of classical thunder to his Irish name, perhaps in honor of Admiral Nelson who had been made Duke of Brontë—the dukedom was located on the slopes of Etna and is believed to have derived its name from the Cyclops slumbering beneath.
4. Pronounced heck-a-ton-key-rays—the hecaton means “hundred” and the chires “hands” (as in “chiropractor”).
5. “Tethys” is also the name palaeontologists give to the great ancient sea that was an ancestor of the Mediterranean.
6. Since there were perhaps three thousand Oceanids it would be fruitless to list them, even if all their names were known. But it is worth introducing CALYPSO, AMPHITRITE, and the dark and fearful STYX who—like her brother Nilus—was to become the deity of a very significant river. One more Oceanid merits a mention, but only because of her name—DORIS. Doris the Oceanid. She went on to marry the sea god NEREUS and by him mother many NEREIDS, friendly nymphs of the sea.
7. Themis later became the personification of law, justice, custom—mores, the rules that govern how manners and things are or should be.
8. Typhon gave us typhus, t
yphoid, and the deadly tropical storm, the typhoon. Later we will meet two of Typhon’s repulsive offspring by a half woman, half water snake called ECHIDNA.
9. Momos (MOMUS to the Romans) would go on to be worshipped in a seriocomic literary way as the guiding spirit of Satire. Aesop incorporated him into some of his fables and he is the hero of a lost play by Sophocles.
10. The Romans, perhaps confusingly, called Nemesis INVIDIA, which is also the Latin for “envy.”
11. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman character, Dream, is also known as Morpheus, and formed the inspiration for the character Morpheus played by Laurence Fishburne in the Wachowskis’ Matrix films.
12. Four exceptions perhaps. Hypnos is not so bad after all. The longer you live, the fonder you become of him. And talking of living long—perhaps Geras isn’t too awful either. So five.
13. Their names signify not their size but their chthonic origins—generated from the earth, “Gaia-gen” if you will. Gaia’s name, incidentally, became worn down to Ge in later Greek. She is still there in earth sciences like “geology” and “geography,” not to mention the later environmental studies that have restored her full name—James Lovelock and his popular “Gaia Hypothesis” being a prime example.
14. The sugars of the “manna ash,” which still grows in southern Europe, give their name to today’s sweetener Mannitol.
15. At least the deposed Sky Father has the consolation of the planet Uranus named in his honor—it being the convention that the planets take the Roman names of the gods they represent.
16. The females of the race can be called “Titanesses.”
17. In fact the area of central Greece where Mount Othrys stands is called Magnesia to this day: it gave its name to magnesium, magnets, and, of course, magnetite. Manganese too, through a spelling mistake.
18. As is often the case with extraordinarily attractive people. It is incumbent upon us to apologize or look away when our beauty causes discomfort.