Brightness and Day, whom Night conceived and bore by uniting in love

with Darkness. Earth bore starry Sky first, like to her in size, so that

he covered her all around, everywhere, so that there might always

be a secure seat for the blessed gods. And Earth gave birth to the blessed

Mountains, the pleasant halls of the gods, the nymphs who live in the wooded

hills. She bore the barren waters, raging with its swell, Sea, without making

delightful love.

But then, uniting with Sky, Earth bore deep-swirling Ocean,

and Koios, and Kreios, and Hyperion, and Iapetos, and Theia, and Rhea,

and Themis, and Mnemosynê, and golden-crowned Phoibê, and beloved

Tethys. After them was born crooked-counseled Kronos, the youngest

and most terrible of these children, who hated his powerful father.

She bore too the Cyclopês with their overweening spirit – Brontês

and Steropês and mighty Argês, who gave to Zeus the thunderbolt

and manufactured the lightning. These creatures were like the gods

in all other ways, but they had a single eye in the middle of their foreheads:

So they were called “Round-Eyes,” because there was a single round

eye in their foreheads. Strength and power and device were in their works.

Earth and Sky had three other children, great and strong,

scarcely to be named—Kottos and Briareos and Gygês, prodigal children.

One hundred arms sprang from their shoulders, scarcely to be imagined,

and fifty heads grew out of the shoulders of each, mounted on powerful

limbs. Their strength was unapproachable, mighty in their great forms.

Of all the offspring of Earth and Sky, these were the most terrible children.

Their father, Sky, hated them from the beginning. And as soon

as one of his children was born, he would hide them all away in a hiding place

of Earth and would not allow them to come into the light, and Sky took

delight in his evil deed. But huge Earth groaned within from the strain,

and she devised an evil trick. Quickly making a gray unconquerable

substance, she fashioned a huge sickle, and she spoke to her dear children.

She said, encouragingly, but sorrowing in her own heart; “My children,

begotten by a mad father, if you are willing to listen to me,

let us take vengeance for your father’s wicked outrage. For he first

devised unseemly deeds.” So she spoke, but fear seized them all, nor did

any of them speak. Then, taking courage, the crooked-counseling Kronos

answered his excellent mother. “Mother, I will undertake this deed

and I will bring it to completion, for I do not like our father and his evil

name. It was he who first began unseemly deeds.”

So he spoke,

and vast Earth rejoiced greatly in her heart. She took Kronos and hid

him in an ambush. She placed the saw-toothed sickle in his hands.

She laid out the whole plot. Great Sky came, dragging night, and he lay