Chronos

Greek cosmogony has more than one starting point, and the theogonies that begin with Time are the ones that least resemble Hesiod. Pherecydes of Syros, writing in the sixth century BCE, is reported to have opened with three beings who always were: Zas, Chthonie and Chronos. His Chronos makes fire, wind and water out of his own seed, and from those the generations of gods proceed. The account survives in fragments and in later summaries rather than whole, so what can be said about it is limited by what the summarisers chose to record.

The Orphic theogonies go further. In the version Damascius reports from the Rhapsodies, unaging Chronos is a serpentine figure with the heads of a bull and a lion, joined with Ananke, necessity, whose coils wrap the whole of things. Chronos fashions an egg in the aether, and out of the egg comes Phanes, the first-born shining god, from whom the rest descend. Time here is not a measure applied to events but the maker of the frame within which events can happen at all.

That is a philosopher's cosmogony as much as a priestly one, and it was read as such early: the Derveni papyrus shows a fourth century commentator already treating an Orphic poem allegorically. Whether these accounts preserve early tradition or later systematising, and how much Iranian material stands behind the serpent bound with necessity, are argued rather than settled.

Chronos, time, and Cronus, the Titan who mutilated his father and swallowed his children, are two names with two spellings and two stories. Antiquity ran them together anyway. The identification was available to Hellenistic allegorists, for whom a god who devours his own offspring is an obvious figure for time consuming what it produces, and Roman writers repeat it; Cicero records the derivation approvingly in De Natura Deorum.

Because Rome identified Cronus with Saturn, the merged figure passed into Latin, and then into the medieval and Renaissance handbooks, as Saturn, and the attributes travelled with him. The sickle the Titan used against his father became the scythe of the reaper. Old age, the slowest of the planets, the melancholic temperament, agriculture, lead and endings all attached themselves to the same figure, and astrology inherited the whole bundle.

The winged old man with an hourglass and a scythe who appears in Renaissance and Baroque painting, and who still stands beside the infant new year in Victorian cartoons, is the end of that process. Father Time is not a survival of a Greek cult of Chronos. He is a composite assembled by scholars and painters out of a confusion of names. The atlas holds Chronos and Cronus as separate entries because the sources do distinguish them, whatever later usage made of the pair, and because the primordial Time of the Orphic accounts has a role in cosmogony that the Titan never had.