Rhea (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

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  Rhea handed Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, and he swallowed it whole. The ruler of the cosmos had just been deceived by his own wife. The infant he believed he had consumed was already hidden in a cave on the island of Crete. A group of warrior attendants kept watch over the hidden child, concealing him from his own father. Who was this goddess who could outwit the king of the Titans? And what happened to her once Zeus claimed the throne?

• 2. Born of Sky and Earth

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  Gaia and Uranus, the earth and sky themselves, counted Rhea among their twelve Titan children. Her siblings formed a vast generation: Oceanus, Hyperion, Mnemosyne, Themis, Theia, Phoebe, Tethys, Coeus, Crius, Iapetus, and Cronus. With Gaia's help, Cronus overthrew his father, freed his siblings, and took his sister Rhea as his wife. Early myth placed the new couple on snowy Mount Olympus, which a pair named Ophion and Eurynome had previously ruled. Rhea was said to be skilled in wrestling. She battled Eurynome directly and hurled her into the waves of the Ocean. She and Cronus became rulers in their place.

  The Greeks debated the meaning of Rhea's name. Some ancient etymologists traced it to era, meaning "ground" or "earth"; Ioannes Stamatakos supported this reading. Plato and the philosopher Chrysippus connected it instead to rheo, meaning "to flow" or "to discharge." A third tradition linked it to words for the pomegranate: rhoa and the later rhoia. The scholar Hjalmar Frisk surveyed these proposals and found none of them convincing. A separate modern hypothesis places the name's roots in a Pre-Greek or Minoan source, suggesting her identity predates the Greek world itself.

• 3. The Price of a Prophecy

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  Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon were swallowed by their father one by one at birth. By the time Rhea was pregnant with a sixth child, she had watched Cronus consume five of her offspring. She turned to Gaia and Uranus, and together the three devised a plan.

  Several ancient accounts added their own details to what followed. By the will of Rhea, a golden dog guarded a goat whose udder nourished the hidden infant. When Zeus grew to power, he transformed that goat into an immortal among the stars. The golden dog that had guarded the sacred spot in Crete was stolen by a man named Pandareus.

  One version of the story survives only on the east frieze of a temple at Lagina. There, the goddess Hecate is shown presenting the stone to Cronus while the real infant is carried away to safety. This frieze is the only surviving record of Hecate's involvement in the rescue.

  Rhea caught Cronus in Crete in the company of a nymph named Philyra. To avoid being recognized by his wife, Cronus transformed himself into a horse and galloped away. When the time came to end Cronus's rule, some traditions credited Rhea with a direct role. She and Metis together gave him the potion that forced him to disgorge his children.

  The Methydrians of Arcadia pressed their own claim to the story. They held that Rhea came to Mount Thaumasios to enlist Giants as allies. It was there, they said, not in Crete, where Cronus was deceived and the substitution took place. On the summit of that mountain stood Rhea's Cave. No human being might enter it except women who were consecrated to the goddess.

• 4. A Mother's Long Afterlife

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  At the birth of her grandson Apollo, Rhea was present alongside many goddesses. Two were conspicuously absent: Hera, and Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth. Their absence left Leto in terrible pain. Rhea was understood to be a goddess who eased the suffering of women in labor.

  According to the poet Bacchylides, Rhea restored Pelops to life after his father Tantalus had slain him. Zeus sent her to Demeter with a separate task: to persuade Demeter to return to Olympus after Persephone had been taken by Hades.

  In one Orphic myth, Zeus pursued his own mother with desire, and Rhea refused him. She changed into a serpent to escape. Zeus transformed as well and raped her. The child of that union was Persephone. Rhea was so frightened by the newborn that she fled and did not nurse her. The same tradition held that Rhea afterward became Demeter.

  Her authority reached beyond family. At the fall of Troy, Rhea and Aphrodite rescued Creusa, wife of Aeneas, from enslavement by the Greeks. Later, a local warlord named Turnus set fire to Aeneas's fleet. Rhea remembered that those hulls had been built from trees felled on her sacred mountains. She transformed the burning ships into sea nymphs. A man named Sangas who offended her was turned into a river that bore his name. That river, the Sangarius, is now called the Sakarya River in Asia Minor. A Phrygian man named Pyrrhus attempted to violate her and was changed into stone.

  The mortal princess Semele died giving birth to Dionysus, and Rhea became the child's guardian. When Hera afflicted him with a raging madness that drove him to wander aimlessly, Rhea healed him. She gave him the amethyst, thought by the ancients to prevent drunkenness. Rhea sometimes joined him and his Maenads in their frenzy dances.

• 5. Lions, Drums, the Great Mother

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  Rhea had, in the words of one ancient assessment, "no strong local cult or identifiable activity under her control." Her worship was original to Crete, and it was intense. Her rites centered on rhythmic, raucous chants and dances. The tympanon, a wide, handheld drum, was the instrument at the heart of the sound. Priests impersonated her mythical attendants, the Curetes and Dactyls, with a clashing of bronze shields and cymbals. The drum's role in her rites may have been the origin of its later place in the worship of Cybele. In historical times, the resemblances between the two goddesses were so marked that some Greeks regarded Cybele as their own Rhea. They believed she had deserted her original home on Mount Ida in Crete and fled to the wilds of Phrygia.

  She was widely known by the title Meter Theon, "Mother of the Gods," and temples under that name stood across ancient Greece. Pausanias recorded sanctuaries in Anagyros in Attika, Megalopolis in Arkadia, and on the Acropolis of Ancient Corinth. A fourth stood in the Keramaikos district of Athens, where the statue was the work of Pheidias. Sparta maintained a sanctuary to Meter Megale, the Great Mother. Olympia had both an altar and a temple, small, in the Doric style, still called the Metroion in Pausanias's time. By then it held statues of Roman emperors and no image of the goddess herself. Her oldest sanctuary in the Peloponnese stood at Akriai in Lakedaimon. A statue of Parian marble by the sculptor Damophon stood in Messene. At Knossos, ruins were pointed out as the foundations of a House of Rhea. A cypress grove consecrated to her from ancient times stood nearby.

  Rhea appears in Greek art only from the fourth century BC onward. When she does appear, her imagery borrows from that of Cybele. Both goddesses were shown wearing a crown, seated on a throne flanked by lions, or riding a lion. Either could also appear on a chariot drawn by two lions. The Romans made the identification official. They brought the goddess Magna Mater deorum Idaea to Rome and treated her as equivalent to Rhea. On a functional level, they equated her with Ops.

  Homer knew Rhea as the mother of the gods, though he distinguished her from Cybele, the Phrygian Great Mother. In the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes, the two identities merged. The seer Mopsus told Jason: "Upon the Mother depend the winds, the ocean, the whole earth beneath the snowy seat of Olympus; whenever she leaves the mountains and climbs to the great vault of heaven, Zeus himself, the son of Cronus, makes way, and all the other immortal gods likewise make way for the dread goddess." Jason climbed to a sanctuary on Mount Dindymon to offer sacrifice and libations. His crew fashioned a xoanon, an image of the goddess carved from a vine-stump. The Argonautica credited the Phrygian custom of worshipping with tambourines and drums to the rites his crew performed there. The second largest moon of Saturn bears the goddess's name, as does the large flightless bird called the Rhea.