Rhea was united to Kronos. Kronos, having learned from his parents, Heaven and Earth, that he was fated to be deprived by one of his sons of the kingdom which he had taken from his father, devoured his children as fast as they were born. Rhea, when about to be delivered of Zeus, besought her parents to teach her how she might save him. Instructed by Earth, she concealed him in a cavern of Crete, and gave a stone in his stead to Kronos. This stone he afterward threw up, and with it the children whom he had devoured. When Zeus was grown up, he and the other children of Kronos made war on their father and the Titans. The scene of the conflict was Thessaly; the former fought from Olympus, the latter from Othrys. During ten entire years the conflict was undecided; at length, by the counsel of Earth, the Kronids released the Hundred-handed and called them to their aid. The war was then resumed with renewed vigor, and the Titans were finally vanquished and imprisoned in Tartarus, under the guard of the Hundred-handed. The Kronids then, by the advice of Earth, gave the supreme power to Zeus, who, in return, distributed honors and dominion among the associates of his victory. GODS OF THE GRECIANS. The Greeks of the early ages regarded the lofty Thessalian mountain named Olympus as the dwelling of their gods. In the Odyssey, where the deities are of a character far more dignified and elevated than in the Ilias, the place of their abode shares in their exaltation; and it may almost be doubted if the poet who drew the following picture of Olympus could have conceived it to be no more than the summit of a terrestrial mountain: “Olympus, where they say the ever firm Seat of the gods is, by the winds unshaken, Nor ever wet with rain, nor ever showered With snow, but cloudless ether o’er it spreads, And glittering light encircles it around, On which the happy gods aye dwell in bliss.” Man loves to bestow his own form upon his gods, as being the noblest that he can conceive. Those of Homer are all of the human form, but of far larger dimensions than men; great size being an object of admiration both in men and women in those early and martial ages. Thus, when the goddess Athena ascends as driver the chariot of Diomedes, Loud groaned the beechen axle with the weight, For a great god and valiant chief it bore; when in the battle of the gods Arés is struck to the earth by this goddess, he is described as covering seven plethra of ground; the helmet of the goddess herself would, we are told, cover the footmen of a hundred towns; when Hera is about to make an oath she lays one hand on the earth, the other on the sea; the voice of Poseidón and Arés are as loud as the shout of nine or ten thousand men.