Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

‘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.fn19 One by one he spewed up the five children he had swallowed. First out was Hera.fn20 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 saviour and their leader. They swore allegiance to him for ever. 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.

Part Two

THE BEGINNING

Clash of the Titans

At the summit of Mount Othrys, Kronos lay stretched out on the ground. The other Titans had not yet learned of Zeus’s rescue of his brothers and sisters, but it seemed likely that when they did they would react with furious violence. Under cover of the night Rhea and her six children slipped away, putting as great a distance between themselves and Titan country as they could.

War, Zeus understood clearly, was inevitable. Kronos would not rest as long as his children lived and Zeus was just as determined to dethrone his father. He heard louder than ever the sound he had heard within him since infancy: a softly insistent whisper from Moros telling him that it was his destiny to rule.