Eos carried off Tithonus; their story is simply and effectively told in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (5. 218-38): Eos went to Zeus, the dark-clouded son of Cronus, to ask that Tithonus be immortal and live forever. Zeus nodded his assent and accomplished her wish. Poor goddess, she did not think to ask that her beloved avoid ruinous old age and retain perpetual youth. Indeed as long as he kept his desirable youthful bloom, Tithonus took his pleasure with early-born Eos of the golden throne by the stream of Oceanus at the ends of the earth. But when the first gray hairs sprouted from his beautiful head and noble chin, Eos avoided his bed. But she kept him in her house and tended him, giving him food, ambrosia, and lovely garments. When hateful old age oppressed him completely and he could not move or raise his limbs, the following plan seemed best to her. She laid him in a room and closed the shining doors. From within his voice flows faintly and he no longer has the strength that he formerly had in his supple limbs.   Later writers add that eventually Tithonus was turned into a grass hopper. By far the most important Titans are Cronus and Rhea, but before we consider them we must again take up Hesiod's account (Theogony 139-210). In addition to the Titans, Uranus and Ge bore Brontes (Thunder), Steropes (Lightning), and Arges (Bright), who were called Cyclopes (Orb-Eyed) because they each had only one eye in the middle of their forehead. They in their might and skill forged the thunder and lightning, Uranus and Ge also bore Cottus, Briareus, and Gyes, who were even more overbearing and monstrous than the Cyclopes; they each had a hundred arms and hands and fifty heads and were named the Hecatonchires (hundredhanded or -armed). Hesiod says that these were the most terrible children of Uranus and Ge, and from the beginning their own father hated them. His account is worth reproducing in full:   As each of his children was born, Uranus hid them all in the depths of Ge and did not allow them to emerge into the light. And he delighted in his wickedness. But huge Earth in her distress groaned within and devised a crafty and evil scheme.

At once she created gray adamant and fashioned a great sickle and confided in her dear children.   `Sorrowing in her heart she urged them as follows: "My children born of a presumptuous father, if you are willing to obey, we shall punish his evil insolence. For he was the first to devise shameful actions." Thus she spoke. Fear seized them all and not one answered. But great and wily Cronus took courage and spoke to his dear mother: "I shall undertake and accomplish the deed, since I do not care about our abominable father. For he was the first to devise shameful actions." Thus he spoke. And huge Earth rejoiced greatly in her heart. She hid him in an ambush and placed in his hands the sickle with jagged teeth and revealed the whole plot to him. Great Uranus came leading on night and desirous of love lay on Ge, spreading himself over her completely. And his son from his ambush reached out with his left hand and in his right he seized hold of the huge sickle with jagged teeth and swiftly cut off the genitals of his own dear father and threw them so that they fell behind him. And they did not fall from his hand in vain. Earth received all the bloody drops that fell and in the course of the seasons bore the strong Erinyes and the mighty giants (shining in their armor and carrying long spears in their hands) and nymphs of ash trees (called Meliae on the wide earth). And when first he had cut off the genitals with the adamant and cast them from the land on the swelling sea, they were carried for a long time on the deep. And white foam arose about from the immortal flesh and in it a maiden grew. First she was brought to holy Cythera, and then from there she came to sea-girt Cyprus.

And she emerged a dread and beautiful goddess and grass rose under her slender feet. Gods and men call her Aphrodite, and the foam-born goddess because she grew amid the foam, and Cytherea of the beautiful crown because she came to Cythera, and Cyprogenes because she arose in Cyprus washed by the waves. She is called too Philommedes (genital-loving) because she arose from the genitals.  Eros attended her and beautiful desire followed her when she was born and -when she first went into the company of the gods. From the beginning she has this honor, and among men and the immortal gods she wins as her due the whispers of girls, smiles, deceits, sweet pleasure, and the gentle delicacy of love. The stark power of this passage is felt even in translation. Its brutal and transparent illustration of basic motives and forces in man's nature provides fertile material for modern psychology: the youngest son whose devotion to his mother is used by her against the father, the essentially sexual nature of love, the terror of castration. The castration complex of the Freudians is the male's unconscious fear of being deprived of his sexual potency, which springs from his feeling of guilt because of his unrecognized hatred of his father and desire for his mother. Hesiod provides literary documentation for the elemental psychic conscience of mankind. In this view is it Hesiod's art that gets to the essence of things?   Or is it that he is close to the primitive expression of the elemental in man's nature? It is a commonplace to say that although elements of the more grotesque myths may be detected in Greek literature, they were humanized and refined by the Greeks and transformed by their genius. Yet it is also true that these primitive elements were retained deliberately and consciously because of the horror, shock, and revelation that they contain. The Greeks did not suppress the horrible and horrifying; they selected from it and used it boldly with profound insight and sensitivity. Thus Hesiod's account may reflect a primitive myth, the ultimate origins of which we can never really know, but his version gives it meaning with an artistry that is far from primitive." Aphrodite and Eros will be considered more fully in a later chapter, and the Erinyes (spirits of vengeance for blood-guilt) will subsequently play an important role. Now we must return to Hesiod's account of how Cronus and his sister Rhea usurped the powers and the functions of their parents, Uranus and Ge. Hesiod tells of the union of Cronus and Rhea and the birth of their important offspring: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, and how Cronus devoured all these children, except Zeus.

Hesiod relates (Theogony 453-506): Great Cronus swallowed his children as each one came from the womb to the knees of their holy mother, with the intent that no other of the illustrious descendants of Uranus should hold kingly power among the immortals. For he learned from Ge and starry Uranus that it was fated that he be overcome by his own child. And so he kept vigilant watch and lying in wait he swallowed his children. A deep and lasting grief took hold of Rhea and when she was about to bring forth Zeus, father of gods and men, then she entreated her own parents, Ge and starry Uranus, to plan with her how she might bring forth her child in secret and how the avenging fury of her father, Uranus, and of her children whom great Cronus of the crooked counsel swallowed, might exact vengeance. And they readily heard their dear daughter and were persuaded, and they counseled her about all that was destined to happen concerning Cronus and his stout-hearted son. And they sent her to the town of Lyctus in the rich land of Crete when she was about to bring forth the youngest of her children, great Zeus. And vast Ge received him from her in wide Crete to nourish and foster. Carrying him from there Ge came first through the swift black night to Dicte. And taking him in her hands she hid him in the deep cave in the depths of the holy earth on thickly wooded Mt. Aegeum.  And she wrapped up a great stone in infant's coverings and gave it to the son of Uranus, who at that time was the great ruler and king of the gods. Then he took it in his hands, poor wretch, and rammed it down his belly. He did not know in his heart that there was left behind, in the stone's place, his son unconquered and secure, who was soon to overcome him and drive him from his power and rule among the immortals. Cronus and Rhea are once again deities of sky and earth, doublets of Uranus and Ge, and like them their union represents the enactment of the universal holy marriage. But in the tradition Cronus and Rhea have a more specific reality than their parents. Cronus appears in art as a majestic and sad deity, sickle in hand. He rules, as we shall see, in a golden age among men, and afier he is deposed by Zeus, he retires to some distant realm, sometimes designated as the Islands of the Blessed, one of the Greek conceptions of paradise. Rhea, too, has a definite mythological personality, although basically she represents another one of the many names and guises of the all-pervading and important mother-goddesses of earth and fertility. She sometimes is equated with Cybele, an Oriental goddess who intrudes upon the classical world; worship of her involved frenzied devotion and elements of mysticism; her attendants played music on drums and cymbals and her myth involves a handsome young lover subordinate to her, named Attis. It is of great significance that Hesiod places the birth of Zeus on the island of Crete and we can detect in his version some of the basic motives in the creation of myth. 

Variations and additions occur in later writers who state that after Rhea brought forth Zeus in a cave on Mt. Dicte, he was fed by bees and nursed by nymphs on the milk of a goat named Amalthea. Curetes (the word means "young men") guarded the infant and clashed their spears on their shields so that his cries would not be heard by his father, Cronus. These attendants and the noise they make suggest the frantic devotees of a mother-goddess: Ge, Rhea, or Cybele. The myth is etiological in its explanation of the origin of rites connected with her worship. This story may also reflect history: the amalgamation of at least two different peoples or cultures in the early period. When the inhabitants of Crete (ca. 3000) began to build their great civilization and empire, the religion that they developed (insofar as we can ascertain) was Mediterranean in character, looking back to earlier Eastern concepts of a mother-goddess. The Northern invaders who entered the peninsula of Greece (ca. 2000) bringing with them an early form of Greek and their own gods (chief of whom was Zeus) built a significant Mycenaean civilization on the mainland, but it was strongly influenced by the older, more sophisticated power of Crete. The myth of the birth of Zeus reads very much like an attempt to link by geography and genealogy the religion and deities of both cultures. Zeus, the Nordic male god of the Indo-Europeans, is born of Rhea, the Oriental goddess of motherhood and fertility. Two dominant strains in the character of subsequent Greek thought can be understood at least partly in terms of this thesis. W.K.C. Guthrie identifies this dual aspect of the religion of classical Greece in the contrast between the Olympian gods of Homer and the cult of the mother-goddess Demeter at Eleusis. His clear and forceful explanation is worth quoting.

The Mother-goddess is the embodiment of the fruitful earth, giver of life and fertility to plants, animals and men. Her cult takes certain forms, involving at least the more elementary kinds of mysticism, that is, the belief in the possibility of a union between the worshipper and the object of his worship. Thus the rites may take the form of adoption as her son or of sexual communion. Orgiastic elements appear, as in the passionate, clashing music and frenzied dancing employed by the followers of Rhea or Cybele. . . . What an essentially different atmosphere we are in from that of the religion of the Achaean heroes described by Homer. There we are in clear daylight, in a world where the gods are simply more powerful persons who might fight for or against one, with whom one made bargains or contracts. The Achaean warrior did not seek to be born again from the bosom of Hera. He was indeed the reverse of a mystic by temperament.   We can detect the ramifications of this paradox again and again in many places, but perhaps we feel it most clearly in the mysticism and mathematics that permeate Greek philosophical attitudes: the numbers of Pythagoras and the immortality of the soul in Orphic doctrine; the dichotomy of Platonic thought and Socratic character in the search for clarity and definition through rational argument coupled with the sound of an inner voice, the depths of a trance, and divine revelation in terms of the obscure and profound symbols of religious myth. God is a geometer and a mystic.   We can detect the ramifications of this paradox again and again in many places, but perhaps we feel it most clearly in the mysticism and mathematics that permeate Greek philosophical attitudes: the numbers of Pythagoras and the immortality of the soul in Orphic doctrine; the dichotomy of Platonic thought and Socratic character in the search for clarity and definition through rational argument coupled with the sound of an inner voice, the depths of a trance, and divine revelation in terms of the obscure and profound symbols of religious myth. God is a geometer and a mystic.