Cronus.
The youngest of the Titans, Cronus was said by Hesiod to be the most terrible. When his father, Uranus, tried to prevent the birth of the Titans, Cronus castrated him with a sickle and released his brothers and sisters from inside their mother, Gaia. Now ruler of the world, he married his sister Rhea and fathered the Olympian deities Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Seeking to avert the prophecy that one of his children would dethrone him, Cronus swallowed each of them at birth. Only Zeus (Jupiter) escaped; when he reached maturity he forced Cronus to disgorge the other Olympians and subsequently led them in a victorious revolt against the Titans.
In other myths, after the overthrow of Uranus, Cronus ruled the earth in a peaceful, idyllic period known as the Golden Age. One tale tells of his love of the Oceanid Philyra and of how, upon being surprised by Rhea, he turned himself and the nymph into horses. The centaur Chiron was their offspring.
In Roman mythology, Cronus was identified with Saturn, an ancient Italian deity who may have been a seed god. Saturn was the husband of Ops, the Roman goddess of abundance associated with the Greek Rhea and perhaps with the Phrygian fertility goddess Cybele. According to Virgil, King Latinus of Latium was descended from Saturn and kept statues of Saturn and Janus in his palace hall. The Saturnalia, a mid-December festival celebrated in Saturn’s honor, was a time of goodwill and gift-giving, during which sacrifices were made at the temple of Saturn and a public feast was held; Saturn is thus sometimes depicted as a personification of winter in postclassical art.
According to the Roman author Varro (as quoted by Augustine in City of God), “Saturn is called Cronus, indicating as a Greek word the extent of time, without which the seed cannot be fertile.” The association of Cronus with time (Greek, chronos) may be a deliberate pun by Varro and may also explain the popular postclassical image of Saturn as Father Time, an old man carrying his scythe.

Classical Sources. Homer, Iliad 14.203F, i4.27iff., 15.221® Hesiod, Theqgony 137-210,168-82, 453—91; Work and Days 169®. Pindar, Olympian Odes 2.70®. Orphic Hymns 13, ‘To Cronus.” Plato, Politicos 269A, 276A. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2.1231-41. Virgil, Aeneid 7.i&of. Horace, Epodes 16.63. Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.89-116, 2.676, 6.126; Fasti 4.197. Apollodorus, Biblioteca 1.1.1-2.1. Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.7.6®, 8.36.2® Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods 14, “Hermes and Helios.” Augustine, City of God 7.19.

Further Reference. Erwin Panofsky, “Saturn,” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939). Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964).

Listings are arranged under the following headings:
General List Birth of the Olympians See also Gods and Goddesses, as Seasons; Titans and Giants; Uranus.