Kronos

Kronos is the youngest of the twelve Titans and the one who moves first. His father Ouranos, the sky, was imprisoning their monstrous siblings inside Gaia, the earth; Gaia made a sickle of adamant and asked her sons to act. Only Kronos would. He maimed his father and took the sky's power for himself.

Ouranos, falling, told him he would be overthrown by his own child in turn. Kronos took the warning literally and comprehensively: as each child was born to his sister-wife Rhea, he swallowed it whole. Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon all went the same way, alive and undigested inside him.

Rhea saved the sixth. She gave birth to Zeus in secret on Crete and handed Kronos a stone wrapped in swaddling, which he swallowed without checking. Zeus was raised hidden and came back grown, forced his father to disgorge the others, and led the ten-year war called the Titanomachy that ended with the Titans thrown into Tartarus.

There is a stranger, older Kronos underneath the child-eating one — a harvest god of a lost Golden Age, remembered in the Roman Saturnalia. The Greeks kept both and never reconciled them, which is why he reads as both a monster and a memory of better times.

The sickle is worth a second look. Hesiod specifies it is made of adamant, an unbreakable substance, and Gaia supplies it — meaning the earth arms the son against the sky. The same weapon appears again in later art as the scythe of Father Time and eventually of Death, an inheritance that runs from a Titan to a figure in a hood by way of a mistranslation.