In art, Rhea is usually depicted seated in a throne flanked by lions or on a chariot drawn by two lions. A reverse view was expressed by Virgil, and it is probably true that cultural contacts with the mainland brought to Crete the worship of the Asiatic Great Mother, who became the Cretan Rhea. In historic times, the resemblances between Rhea and the Asiatic Great Mother, Phrygian Cybele, a manifestation of the Great Goddess, were so noticeable that the Greeks accounted for them by regarding the latter as their own Rhea, who had deserted her original home in Crete and fled to the mountain wilds of Asia Minor to escape the persecution of Cronus.
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These attendants afterwards became the bodyguard of Zeus and the priests of Rhea, and performed ceremonies in her honor. There, according to myth, she saved the new-born Zeus, her sixth child, from being devoured by Cronus, by substituting a stone for the infant god and entrusting him to the care of her attendants the Curetes. The original seat of her worship was in Crete. Similarly, in later myths, Zeus would swallow Metis to prevent the birth of her child, Athena, but she was born unharmed, out of a wound made in his head by one of the other gods. Zeus and his siblings, together with the Gigantes, Hecatonkheires, and Cyclopes, overthrew Cronus and the other Titans. Then Zeus released the brothers of Cronus, the Gigantes, the Hecatonkheires and the Cyclops, who gave him thunder and lightning, which had previously been hidden by Gaia. In some versions, Metis gave Cronus an emetic to force him to disgorge the babies, or Zeus cut Cronus' stomach open.
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Zeus forced Cronus to disgorge the other children in the reverse order in which they had been swallowed, the oldest becoming the last, and youngest: first the stone, which was set down at Pytho under the glens of Parnassus to be a sign to mortal men, then the rest. Since Cronus ruled over the earth, the heavens, and the sea and swallowed all of the children of Rhea, Adamanthea hid him by dangling him on a rope from a tree so he was suspended between earth, sea, and sky and thus, invisible to his father.
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He was suckled by a goat named Amalthea, while a company of Kouretes, soldiers, or smaller gods, shouted and clashed their swords together to make noise so that Cronus would not hear the baby's cry,.According to varying versions of the story: Then she hid Zeus in a cave on Mount Ida in Crete. Rhea gave birth to Zeus in Crete, handing Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he promptly swallowed. When Zeus was about to be born, however, Rhea sought Uranus and Gaia to devise a plan to save him, so that Cronus would get his retribution for his acts against Uranus and his own children. This time was called the Golden Age.Ĭronus sired six children by Rhea: Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera and Zeus in that order, but swallowed them all as soon as they were born, since he had learned from Gaia and Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own child as he had overthrown his own father.
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He and Rhea took the throne as King and Queen of the gods. After this, Cronus re-imprisoned the Hekatonkheires, the Gigantes and the Cyclopes and set the monster Campe to guard them. The Romans identified Rhea with the Goddess Ops.Ĭronus, Rhea's Titan brother and husband, castrated their father, Uranus. In earlier traditions, she was strongly associated with Gaia and Cybele, the Great Goddess, and was later seen by the classical Greeks as the mother of the Olympian gods and goddesses, though never dwelling permanently among them on Mount Olympus. Rhea (pronounced: /ˈriː.ə/ Ancient Greek Ῥέα) was the Titaness daughter of Uranus, the sky, and Gaia, the earth, in Greek mythology.