‘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.
The bloody, violent and destructive conflict that followed is known to historians as the TITANOMACHY.fn1 While most of the details of this ten-year war may be lost to us, we do know that the heat and fury, the explosive power and colossal energy released by the battling Titans, gods and monsters caused mountains to bellow fire and the ground itself to quake and crack. Many islands and landmasses were formed by these battles. Whole continents shifted and reshaped themselves and much of the world as we know it now owes its geography to these seismic disturbances, to this literally earth-shaking conflict.
In a straight fight it is almost certain that the combined strength of the Titans would have been too much for their young adversaries. They were stronger and more remorselessly savage. All but Clymene’s sons Prometheus and Epimetheus sided with Kronos, far outnumbering the small group of self-styled gods ranged against them under Zeus’s generalship. But just as Ouranos had paid dearly for his crime of imprisoning the Cyclopes and Hecatonchires inside Gaia, so Kronos was about to pay for the blunder of imprisoning them in the caverns of Tartarus.
It was the wise and clever Metis who advised Zeus to go down and release his three one-eyed and three hundred-handed brothers. He offered them freedom in perpetuity if they would help him defeat Kronos and the Titans. They needed no further encouragement. The Gigantes too chose to side with Zeus and proved themselves brave and tireless fighters.fn2
In the final decisive battle the pitiless ferocity of the Hecatonchires – not to mention their surplus of heads and hands – combined quite marvellously with the wild electric power of the Cyclopes whose names were, if you recall, Brightness, Lightning and Thunder: Arges, Steropes and Brontes. These gifted craftsmen hammered their mastery of storms into thunderbolts for Zeus to use as weapons, which he learned to fling with pinpoint accuracy at his enemies, blasting them to atoms. Under his direction the Hecatonchires picked up and hurled rocks at furious speed, while the Cyclopes harried and dazzled the enemy with lightning shows and terrifying peals of thunder. The hundred hands of the Hecatonchires scooped and launched, scooped and launched innumerable rocks at the enemy like so many demented windmilling catapults until, bludgeoned and battered, the Titans called for a ceasefire.
We will leave them, their great bloodied heads bowed in full and final surrender, and take a moment to look at what else had been going on in the world while battle raged for those ten terrible years.
The Proliferation
The fire and fury of war had scorched, enriched and fertilized the earth. New growth burst through to create a fresh, green world for the triumphant gods to inherit.
If you remember, Cosmos had once been nothing but Chaos. Then Chaos had spewed up the first forms of life, the primordial beings and the principles of lightness and darkness. As each generation developed and new entities were born and in turn reproduced, so complexity increased. Those old primordial and elemental principles were spun into life-forms of ever greater diversity, variety and richness. The beings that were born became endowed with nuanced and unique personalities and individuality. In computer language, it was as if life went from 2 bit to 4 bit to 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit and beyond. Each iteration represented millions and then billions of new permutations of size, form and what you might call resolution. High definition character, such as we pride ourselves in having as modern humans, came into existence and there was an explosion of what biologists call speciation as new forms burst into being.