Uran, Kronos in Zevsovo rojstvo

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Uran, Kronos in Zevsovo rojstvo

1. Uranus was the first to rule over the whole world. He married Gaia, and their first children were those called the Hundred-Handed: Briareus, Gyes, and Cottus. They were unsurpassed in size and strength, each having a hundred hands and fifty heads.

2. After these, Gaia bore him the Cyclopes: Arges, Steropes, and Brontes, each of whom had a single eye in his forehead. But Uranus bound them and cast them into Tartarus (a place of deep darkness in Hades, as far beneath the earth as the earth is beneath the sky),

3. and then fathered more children by Gaia: sons called the Titans—Oceanus, Coeus, Hyperion, Crius, Iapetus, and Cronus, the youngest of all—and daughters called the Titanesses—Tethys, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Dione, and Theia.

4. Gaia, outraged at the loss of her children who had been cast into Tartarus, persuaded the Titans to attack their father and gave Cronus an adamantine sickle. All except Oceanus attacked him, and Cronus cut off his father's genitals and threw them into the sea. From the drops of flowing blood arose the Erinyes: Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera. Having overthrown their father, the Titans brought up their brothers who had been cast into Tartarus and handed the rule over to Cronus.

5. But Cronus bound them once more and imprisoned them in Tartarus. He married his sister Rhea, and because Gaia and Uranus had foretold that he would be deprived of his rule by his own child, he swallowed his children as they were born. First he swallowed Hestia, the firstborn, then Demeter and Hera, and after them Pluto and Poseidon.

6. Enraged by this, Rhea went to Crete while she was pregnant with Zeus and gave birth to him in a cave on Mount Dicte. She entrusted him to the Curetes and to the nymphs Adrasteia and Ida, daughters of Melisseus, to be brought up.

7. The nymphs fed the child on Amalthea's milk, while the Curetes, guarding the infant in the cave in full armor, clashed their spears against their shields so that Cronus would not hear the child's cries. Rhea wrapped a stone in swaddling clothes and gave it to Cronus to swallow as though it were the newborn child.