Why Zeus Was Afraid of His Own Children | A Greek Mythology Story

Tonight, a storm comes down off the mountain — and we spend the evening with the god inside it, who was frightened for a very long time. Not of monsters. He had already put the monsters underground. He was frightened of a child that had not been born yet. Because it had happened twice already, in the same family, with almost the same words. The sky was overthrown by his son. That son was overthrown by his son. And the third one — the one holding the sceptre, with the thunderbolt that craftsmen made for him in a prison cell — was told it would happen to him too. This is the whole road, walked slowly: the grey sickle made out of the earth herself; five gods swallowed alive and kept awake in the dark for years; a stone wrapped in swaddling bands, and the men who danced in a ring on a Cretan mountain clashing bronze shields so nobody in the sky would hear a baby crying. Then the stone itself — which came back up first, and was set down at Delphi, where people poured oil on it every single day for centuries and laid raw wool on it at festivals, and where a Greek travel writer saw it with his own eyes and wrote down that it wasn't very big. And then the part nobody tells you. What he did when the same prophecy arrived for him — which was not what his father did, and is somehow worse. What a prisoner chained to a rock knew and wouldn't say. And why a wedding on a mountain in northern Greece, arranged by a frightened king, is the reason there was a war at Troy at all. Along the way: clay tablets from a vanished empire that tell the same story five hundred years earlier, an oracle that worked by listening to an oak tree, and the lead strips people scratched their questions on — should I keep sheep, is the child mine, should I buy the little house. Told in second person, in a soft voice, with nothing sudden in it. The rain is meant to put you under long before the end. Wherever you're listening from — leave your town and the hour on your clock in the comments before you drift off. I read them in the mornings, and it's a quiet pleasure seeing how many of us were awake at different times all over the world.