Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #1)

by Stephen Fry

As for Kronos—the dark unhappy soul who had once been Lord of All, the brooding and unnatural tyrant who ate his own children out of fear of prophecy—his punishment, just as his gelded father Ouranos had foretold, was ceaselessly to travel the world, measuring out eternity in inexorable, perpetual, and lonely exile. Every day and hour and minute was his to be marked out, for Zeus doomed Kronos to count infinity itself. We can see him everywhere even today, the gaunt sinister figure with his sickle. Now given the cheap and humiliating nickname “Old Father Time,” his sallow, drawn features tell us of the inevitable and merciless ticking of Cosmos’s clock, driving all to their end days. The scythe swings and cuts like a remorseless pendulum. All mortal flesh is as grass beneath the cruel sweep of its mowing blade. We find Kronos in all things “chronic” or “synchronized,” in “chronometers,” “chronographs,” and “chronicles.”