In the Titanomachia, the generations anterior to Zeus were still further lengthened by making Uranos the son of Æthêr (Fr. 4. Düntzer). Ægæon was also represented as son of Pontus and Gæa, and as having fought in the ranks of the Titans; in the Iliad he (the same who is called Briareus) is the fast ally of Zeus.
A _Titanographia_ was ascribed to Musæus (Schol. Apollôn. Rhod. iii. 1178; compare Lactant. de Fals. Rel. i. 21).
How far these stories are the invention of Hesiod himself is impossible to determine.[30] They bring us down to a cast of fancy more coarse and indelicate than the Homeric, and more nearly resembling some of the Holy Chapters (ἱεροὶ λόγοι) of the more recent mysteries, such (for example) as the tale of Dionysos Zagreus. There is evidence in the Theogony itself that the author was acquainted with local legends current both at Krête and at Delphi; for he mentions both the mountain-cave in Krête wherein the new-born Zeus was hidden, and the stone near the Delphian temple—the identical stone which Kronos had swallowed—“placed by Zeus himself as a sign and wonder to mortal men.” Both these two monuments, which the poet expressly refers to, and had probably seen, imply a whole train of accessory and explanatory local legends—current probably among the priests of Krête and Delphi, between which places, in ancient times, there was an intimate religious connection. And we may trace further in the poem,—that which would be the natural feeling of Krêtan worshippers of Zeus,—an effort to make out that Zeus was justified in his aggression on Kronos, by the conduct of Kronos himself both towards his father and towards his children: the treatment of Kronos by Zeus appears in Hesiod as the retribution foretold and threatened by the mutilated Uranos against the son who had outraged him. In fact the relations of Uranos and Gæa are in almost all their particulars a mere copy and duplication of those between Kronos and Rhea, differing only in the mode whereby the final catastrophe is brought about. Now castration was a practice thoroughly abhorrent both to the feelings and to the customs of Greece;[31] but it was seen with melancholy frequency in the domestic life as well as in the religious worship of Phrygia and other parts of Asia, and it even became the special qualification of a priest of the Great Mother Cybelê,[32] as well as of the Ephesian Artemis. The employment of the sickle ascribed to Kronos seems to be the product of an imagination familiar with the Asiatic worship and legends, which were connected with and partially resembled the Krêtan.[33] And this deduction becomes the more probable when we connect it with the first genesis of iron, which Hesiod mentions to have been produced for the express purpose of fabricating the fatal sickle; for metallurgy finds a place in the early legends both of the Trojan and of the Krêtan Ida, and the three Idæan Dactyls, the legendary inventors of it, are assigned sometimes to one and sometimes to the other.[34]