Chronos

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Waiting Chronos by Santo Saccomanno (1876), sculpture in the monumental cemetery Staglieno , Genoa

Chronos ( Greek  Χρόνος time ) is the personification of time in Greek mythology . He is partially identified with the titan Kronos . It symbolizes the passage of time and also the lifetime .

mythology

Chronos comes from the myths of the Orphics , an ancient religious movement in Greece, southern Italy and the Black Sea coast (approx. From the 6th / 5th century BC). Accordingly, he himself emerged from the dark chaos and, as the creator god, created the silver world egg from the aither . From this in turn the light god Phanes , who was particularly revered by the Orphics and who was identified with Helios , but also with Eros and Dionysus , arose .

Chronos plays an important role in the speculative poetry of the Orphics, but there was never a cult of Chronos in antiquity. There was also no fixed iconography and no depictions of Chronos in archaic and classical Greek art. The oldest known depiction is on a relief from the Hellenistic period. Chronos appears there as a beardless figure with large wings. Chronos was the personification of an abstract idea and not part of the Greek folk religion. The same goes for Phanes, who also had no popular cult.

Representation in art

Baroque monument to Chronos and the mourners in Radebeul

Since around the middle of the 14th century , Chronos has been depicted in the fine arts as a bearded old man with a sickle and an hourglass ( hourglasses only existed at this time); For example, in the oil painting The Wheel of Fate by Walter Crane .

In the Baroque period , a female figure often appears next to him, the plaintive woman or the mourner , as for example with the Chronos monument and the mourning woman in the churchyard of the Friedenskirche in Radebeul- Kötzschenbroda.

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  Bartolomeo Altomonte : The Four Seasons, paying homage to Chronos (1737)

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  The Chronos Fountain (1770–1772) on Hofstrasse in Würzburg by Johann Peter Wagner

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  Chronos by Hans Latt (1904), Cemetery IV of the congregation Jerusalems- und Neue Kirche

Chronos and Kronos

Some ancient sources equate Chronos with Kronos , the father of Zeus . This is a folk etymology , the two gods originally had nothing to do with each other. The Kronos myth probably comes from a proto-Greek , pre-archaic tradition (late 3rd millennium BC to 8th century BC).

literature

• Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher: Chronos 1 . In: Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (Hrsg.): Detailed lexicon of Greek and Roman mythology . Volume 1,1, Leipzig 1886, Col. 899 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Otto Waser : Chronos 2. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume III, 2, Stuttgart 1899, Col. 2481 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Fränkel, Hermann : The conception of time in archaic Greek literature , supplement to the magazine for aesthetics and general art history 25 (1931), pp. 97–118.
• Hans von Geisau : Chronos. In: The Little Pauly (KlP). Volume 1, Stuttgart 1964, column 1166.
• Manuel Bendala Galán:  Chronos . In: Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC). Volume III, Zurich / Munich 1986, pp. 276-278.

Web links

Commons : Chronos  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Chronos in the Theoi Project (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dietrich Grünewald: Time and Picture / Time in Picture , in the booklet “Time of Learning” of the University of Frankfurt, p. 125 (PDF; 1.2 MB)
2. ↑ Figure Walter Crane: Das Rad des Schicksals , ots.at