Chronos

Chronos, whose name is Greek for “time”, is the personification of time in Greek thought. He is not the Titan Cronus, the father of Zeus, though ancient writers sometimes confused or equated the two. Chronos has no place in Hesiod’s Theogony; he appears as a primordial being in late reports of an Orphic theogony, and as a poetic image of time in Pindar and Plato.

Is Chronos a God?

Chronos is best described as a personification. Outside the Orphic theogonies, where he is called the father of Aether and Chaos (see below), he has no family and no stories of his own, and he does not act in the myths of the Olympian gods; he is a power that the poets and philosophers name in order to speak about time.

Chronos in Early Poetry and Philosophy

The poet Pindar speaks of Time as a father of all things: not even Time, the father of all, he says, can undo what has been done, whether done justly or unjustly (Pindar, Olympian 2.15–17). This is a figure of speech and not a myth about a god with a family. In Plato’s Timaeus, time came into being together with the heavens, so that, having been generated together, they would be dissolved together if they were ever dissolved; it is a moving image of eternity (Plato, Timaeus 37d–38c).

The Primordial World According to Hesiod

In Hesiod’s Theogony, first of all came Chaos, then broad-breasted Earth, Tartarus and Eros; from Chaos came Erebus and Night, and from Night, Aether and Day (Hesiod, Theogony 116–125). Chronos is not in the list. Aether here is the child of Night and Erebus, not of any Chronos.

Chronos in the Orphic Tradition

Creation of Aether and Chaos

A late Neoplatonist, Damascius, reports that in the Orphic Rhapsodies the “much honoured” ageless Chronos is the father of Aether and Chaos, and the theology of the Rhapsodies then hymns Protogonos (the first-born) and calls him Zeus, the ordering power of all things and of the whole cosmos (Damascius, On First Principles).

The Serpent with Three Heads

In the same passage Damascius reports another Orphic theology, attributed to Hieronymus and Hellanicus, which describes a third principle, born after Water and Earth, as a dragon of ageless nature with the heads of a bull and a lion and, between them, the face of a god, with wings on its shoulders; with it is a bodiless being, identified with Adrasteia, that stretches through the whole cosmos and touches its limits. The name of the dragon is damaged in the surviving text and is usually restored as Chronos, which is where the image of Chronos as a many-headed serpent comes from. It belongs to this late report of the Orphic tradition and not to Hesiod or the main Olympian myths. The ancient report gives no meaning for the three heads.

Distinction from Cronus

Cronus (Kronos) is a different figure: in Hesiod he is the youngest of the Titans, born to Gaia and Uranus, the “crooked-counselling” one, most terrible of the children, who hated his father (Theogony 133–138). Because the names sound alike, later Greeks played with the likeness. Plutarch says that the Greeks allegorize Kronos as Chronos, time, and reports the view that the Romans honour Saturn as the father of truth because Kronos is the same as Chronos and time discovers the truth (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 32; Roman Questions 12). In Hesiod the two have nothing to do with each other.

Chronos Sources

Hesiod, Theogony 116–138. Pindar, Olympian 2.15–17. Plato, Timaeus 37d–38c. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 32; Roman Questions 12. Damascius, On First Principles (reporting the Orphic Rhapsodies).

See Also: Cronus, Aether, Chaos, Ananke, Titans