Читать книгу The Mythology of Greece and Rome, With Special Reference to Its Use in Art онлайн

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Comparison of the legends of other nations does not show us any such elaborate genealogy. Zeus has his counterparts almost everywhere, and Uranus himself appears in India; but Cronus, in the sense of the father of Zeus, is probably traceable to the common epithet of Zeus, Cronion, which was assumed in later times to be a patronymic. It was natural to deduce from the idea that one power of nature sprang from another, the expression that the god of the first power was the child of the god of the second; it would perhaps be more correct to say that it was the same thing to the early races of men. As to the wars, which were so great a stumbling-block to the Greek philosophers, we may notice that the supreme god must, of course, have been the son of a supreme god; and yet, if his predecessor were supreme, must have dispossessed him.

Fig. 1.—Bust of Cronus. Vatican Museum.

The Titans, not being actually objects of worship, were not frequently represented in ancient art. Cronus is the only exception, which may be explained by the fact that the Romans identified him with their own Saturn, or harvest-god. He is generally depicted with a severe and gloomy expression of countenance, the back of his head being veiled, as a symbol of his reserved character. In the Vatican Museum at Rome there is a bust of this kind in good preservation, an engraving of which we give (Fig. 1).