Page:Hesiod, and Theognis.djvu/94

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HESIOD.
"Lo! then incorruptible Styx the first,Swayed by the awful counsels of her sire,Stood on Olympus and her sons beside;There graced with honour and with goodly gifts,
Her Zeus ordained the great tremendous oathOf deities; her sons for evermoreIndwellers in the heavens. Alike to all,E'en as he pledged his sacred word, the godPerformed; so reigned he strong in might and power."—E. 537-545.

But here Hesiod has been anticipating the sequence of events, and forestalling, to this extent, the second stage of the poem. According to Hesiod, Cronus or Saturn was alive to the faults of his sire's policy of self-protection, and conceived an improvement in the means of checking revolutionary development on the part of his offspring, by imprisoning them in his own bowels rather than their mother's. Mindful of the destiny that "to his own child he should bow down his strength," he proceeded to swallow up his progeny with such regularity, that the maternal feelings of his consort, Rhea, roused her to a spirit of opposition. When about to be delivered of her sixth child, Zeus, she called in the aid of her parents, Heaven and Earth, in the concealment of his birth:—

"And her they sent to Lyctus, to the climeOf fruitful Crete; and when her hour was come,The birth of Zeus, her youngest born, then EarthTook to herself the mighty babe, to rearWith nurturing softness, in the spacious isleOf Crete; so came she then, transporting himSwift through the darksome air, to Lyctus first,
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