Caerus

Caerus, in Greek Kairos, was the personification of Opportunity, the right or critical moment. Most of what Greek literature says about him is about the Greek word kairos itself, but Pausanias records that he had an altar at Olympia and that the poet Ion of Chios wrote a hymn to him, in which he was the youngest child of Zeus (Description of Greece 5.14.9).

Caerus as a God

Pausanias describes the cult of Kairos in his account of Olympia. Near the entrance to the stadium, he says, stood two altars side by side, one of Hermes of the Games and the other of Opportunity. He adds that a hymn to Opportunity was among the poems of Ion of Chios, and that in this hymn Opportunity was made out to be the youngest child of Zeus (Description of Greece 5.14.9). Pausanias names no mother for him.

The Meaning of Kairos

As a word, kairos means the proper time or moment for an action, and also what is fitting or critical. Hesiod uses it in the advice on seafaring in the Works and Days: keep due measure, for the right moment is best in all things (Works and Days 694). In Sophocles' Philoctetes the chorus urges Neoptolemus to act at once, because opportunity, which holds the judgement of all things, often wins a great advantage by a single stroke (Philoctetes 837–838).

In these passages kairos is a quality to be seized when it appears, not a figure with a story of his own. Ion's hymn and the altar at Olympia show that the idea was also given a divine form and a father.

How Caerus Was Shown

The best-known image of Opportunity was a bronze statue by the sculptor Lysippus of Sicyon. In an epigram on it, the poet Posidippus lets the statue explain itself: it stands on tiptoe because it is always running, it has wings on its feet because it flies with the wind, it holds a razor in its right hand as a sign that it is sharper than any edge, and its hair hangs over its face so that whoever meets it may seize it; but the back of its head is bald, so that once it has slipped past, no one can catch it from behind, however much he wants to (Greek Anthology 16.275). Callistratus, describing the same statue, also gives Kairos winged feet and a lock of hair falling over the forehead, with the back of the head bare (Descriptions 6).

The Roman fable-writer Phaedrus describes the same figure: running swiftly, balanced on a razor's edge, bald, with hair on his forehead and a naked body. If you seize him you hold him, but once he has slipped away not even Jupiter can pull him back; the image, Phaedrus says, stands for the brief opportunity of affairs (Fables 5.8). In Latin the idea was called Occasio.