Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’re going to discuss the
three sons of Zeus who, had they reached adulthood and grown into the full potential of their power,
would have become more powerful than their father, who would have succeeded Zeus,
either claiming the crown by force or ascending to the throne with their father’s blessing. And
interestingly, as we’ll explore momentarily, it actually seems as if prophecy - reality itself,
even, looked at one way - contrived to keep Zeus enthroned, ensconced up high in lofty
Olympus. First, we’re going to go over how the fortune of fate stacked the deck in Zeus’s favor,
and then we’re going to go over the three children who would have been more powerful than him.
Alright, Let’s get into it.
Prophecy in Greek mythology is almost always something inexorable, meaning
it can’t be prevented once proclaimed. There are rare exceptions to this, and in general,
gods have more wiggle room than mortals, able to manipulate and maneuver to a limited extent
where humanity is just along for the ride with no agency. For Zeus, the flexibility of fate
is even greater. No other has more autonomy than he in authoring how events play out, and
for this reason, one of his appellations is Zeus Moiragetes, ‘Zeus Master of Fate’. In fact, the
interplay between Zeus and prophecy makes it look as though the cosmos conspired to crown him king
and then keep him king - prophecy first obdurate, this working to facilitate Zeus’ ascension to the
throne, then obedient, allowing Zeus to forestall fate and continue to rule forever unchallenged.
Greek mythology’s far-flung past is largely a story about kingship, a story of son supplanting
father. First Uranus, a primordia l deity and the personification of the sky, was king. He was
usurped by his son Cronus, the youngest - though certainly the most ambitious and audacious - of
the first generation Titans. And he, of course, in turn, was usurped by Zeus, who ripped the reins
of power from his father’s grasp by leading his forces to victory in the Titanomachy,
the war between the gods and the Titans that raged and reshaped the earth for 10 years.
In comparing Cronus’s defeat of Uranus and Zeus’s defeat of Cronus, there is one crucial difference
that starkly separates the two. Cronus’s rise was opportunistic; Zeus’s rise, conversely,
was ordained, woven into the very fabric of reality so that nothing Cronus did could prevent
his eventual defeat and downfall. But this didn’t stop him from trying, as events would bear out,
which is why he went through the whole rigmarole of swallowing his children at the moment of their
births. It was foretold that he would be cast down by one of his children, so he thought to
forestall this by imprisoning them within his own flesh. However, prophecy has a way of coming true,
efforts to avert it of no avail and only leading to delayed fulfilment, ultimately coming to pass
in unexpected fashion. A good analogy for this is the damming of a river. The flow stops for a
while, but given enough time, water pools, spills over somewhere, and begins to flow anew along
another course. In the case of Cronus and Zeus, Cronus thought he had swallowed all six of his
children, but really, he had only swallowed five. Instead of the sixth, his wife gave him a stone,
which he promptly swallowed without deigning to give even a cursory inspection. With Cronus thus
deceived, Zeus then grew and gained strength in the succor of secrecy, later returning to
lay low his father and fulfil the words of prophecy uttered years and years before.
With Zeus as the king of creation, it was almost as if the cosmos, its divine hierarchy, once
plastic and prone to upheaval, had crystallized, satisfied with Zeus on the throne and no longer
wishing for the cycle of son supplanting father to perpetuate. Giving credence to this is the
fact that Zeus had three sons destined to be as or more powerful than himself and none of them
survived past childhood: two of them prevented from being born - Zeus twice forestalling fate
where Cronus failed to do so even once - and the third ripped to pieces by the Titans when he was
just a boy. In other words, prophecy favored Zeus by vacillating between being obdurate and being
obedient. It initially worked to Zeus’s advantage by being unchangeable, ensuring he would somehow
defeat his father. Later, it then also worked to Zeus’s advantage by being changeable, allowing him
to stop the births of children who would have outstripped his own power and overthrown him.
We’re going to spend the rest of the video going over the story of
each of the three children who would have been more powerful than Zeus,
these stories being those of the unnamed son nearly born to Thetis,
the unnamed son nearly born to Metis, and Zagreus, whose life was brief and whose end was brutal.
Thetis was a sea goddess, one of the 50 Nereids, a group of 50 sea nymphs born to Nereus,
a primordial sea deity often characterized as ‘the old man of the sea’. She was pursued by
both Zeus and Poseidon, but both of them relented when they learnt of a prophecy that said the son
either of them would sire by her would be more powerful than them. One account says that Zeus
was determined to bed her, but that he was dissuaded from doing so by Prometheus, who
revealed to him that the son he would sire would become the new ruler of creation. As neither Zeus
nor Poseidon wanted to be challenged, cast down by mighty progeny who sprung from their own loins,
as they both had done to their own father when they defeated the Titans, the two of them were
more than happy when Thetis was married to Peleus, the hero Achilles later born from their union.
Metis was the Titan goddess of Wisdom, and in one account, it was she who supplied Zeus with the
emetic (a substance that induces vomiting) that he used to force Cronus to disgorge his siblings,
thereby freeing them from imprisonment within the belly of their own father. As was the case
with Thetis, Zeus learnt of a prophecy, this one divulged by Gaia and Uranus,
that said any children he sired by Metis would be extremely powerful: first a daughter,
wise and courageous like himself, then a son, mighty and bold, one who would become ruler of
creation. Not wanting to jeopardize his rule, Zeus preempted prophecy, swallowing Metis while she was
pregnant and thus forestalling any eventuality in which he would be overthrown by a son he
sired by her. Later, Hephaestus hacked a cleft in Zeus’s head with the mighty swing of an axe,
and Athena, the daughter destined to be wise and courageous like her father,
emerged fully grown from Zeus’ split skull, already clad in armor and wielding a spear.
As well, beyond nipping in the bud a chain of events that would have seen him follow in his
father’s footsteps, overthrown by his son as he had his own father, it also happened that Zeus,
when he swallowed Metis, became imbued with her power. Her name means ‘wisdom’ or ‘cunning’,
and it was said that Zeus was augmented by those qualities.
Orphism, one of the mystery religions, was an unorthodox offshoot of Greek mythology.
The beliefs of Orphism were thought to have been promulgated by Orpheus, a Greek hero
and the greatest mortal musician. In one his stories, he ventures down into the underworld,
braving the domain of the dead and all the perils therein, to gain an audience with Hades,
beseeching the god of the underworld to release the soul of his dead wife and allow her to return
to the land of the living so that the two of them could be reunited, no longer sundered by death’s
divide. Hades agreed to release Orpheus’ wife, but only if he could lead her out of the underworld
while managing to not look back at her even once the whole time. Orpheus came tantalizingly close,
but when the entrance was in sight, he and his wife on the cusp of returning to the mortal world,
he looked back, and so, then and there, her soul was forever claimed anew,
irrevocably so now. This journey in and out of the underworld is why Orpheus became the
founder of Orphism. According to the adherents of this religion, this journey blessed Orpheus
with special and sacred knowledge of the soul and of what happened after death, knowledge
that would form the foundation of Orphism. He wandered the land imparting what he learned,
becoming the prophet and progenitor of the religion, as the story goes. One of the gods
particular to Orphism was Zagreus, an earlier incarnation of Dionysus. According to the Orphics,
Zagreus was sired by Zeus on Persephone, and he was to be, as sanctioned by his father,
the next king of the gods. Two details that communicate this, Zagreus as the heir apparent,
are Zeus seating Zagreus on the throne and Zeus bestowing Zagreus with lightning, a weapon of
such awesome power that it virtually guaranteed no other could depose him and rule in his place.
Unfortunately, though, this would never come to pass, carnage, rather than coronation,
lurking in the future like a predator waiting in ambush. At some point, Zagreus was left
unattended, and it was then that Hera - who was scorned by Zeus having laid with Persephone,
Zagreus conceived of this extramarital coupling - facilitated the stealthy approach of the Titans,
the gods woefully unaware of the security breach and the enemy soon to be in their midst. After
infiltrating Olympus, the Titans came upon Zagreus alone, yet even though they found him by himself,
and even though he was but a child, far from being a god grown into the bloom of his might,
they still had to exercise the utmost caution; for Zagreus was now a wielder of lightning,
and lighting, even in the hands of one so young and otherwise harmless,
was a weapon deserving of the deepest respect. To trifle with it was to court
peril. So rather than brashly charging in, they used guile and closed in surreptitiously.
They distracted Zagreus with toys and then swarmed him, tearing him to pieces. Though the brunt of
the brutality wasn’t prevented, Athena did manage to swoop in, grab the heart, and escape with it.
Sorely overmatched, she could do no more than steal away what she did and make a hasty retreat.
The Titans - not yet thinking to escape though their mission was accomplished - proceeded to have
a cookout of sorts, using the now unrecognizable mess of Zagreus’s body to prepare a feast. They
boiled the pieces, skewered them, and then roasted them, which, though they did not yet know it,
was tantamount to the signing of their own death warrant. The impromptu culinary scene,
the sounds and smells of it, drew Zeus' attention, bringing him around to investigate. Upon seeing
what unfolded, he became rage incarnate. Even the mightiest black-clouded storm,
all webbed with lightning and booming with thunder, would have paled by comparison. He
let loose a furious barrage of smoking bolts and reduced the Titans to ash in short order. Apollo
was then tasked by Zeus with burying the remains - hacked, boiled, and charred though they were.
Zeus received the heart from Athena, and he used it to brew a potion, one he would give to Semele,
a mortal woman and of his lovers, to imbibe, impregnating her with the god Dionysus. Still,
in another unfortunate turn, what happened in the future would echo the misfortune of the
past in no small way. The second time around, Hera contrived for a pregnant Semele to be incinerated.
This happens when she bears witness to Zeus’s true form, his undimmed might and majesty as king of
the gods, not the muted form he usually assumes on earth so that every mortal he comes across
doesn’t burst into flames. In an instant, where Semele once was there was only ash,
but as before with Athena saving Zagreus’ heart, so too here was there a seed of salvation.
Dionysius’s fetus wasn’t destroyed. Zeus picked it up and sewed it into his own thigh, and the
meat of his leg, serving as a surrogate womb, was where Dionysus gestated and was born from.
And that’s it for this video. If you enjoy the content,
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