CHRONOS. – He is the personification of time among the ancient Greeks. He had no importance either in mythology or in worship; he was instead exploited by Orphic cosmogony, which made him the origin of all things, called him the son of Selene or Heracles, and father of Aion, Eros (Love), the Winds, and the Hours.
In the relief of the apotheosis of Homer, he is depicted with wings, holding in his hands the two scrolls of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The ancients, followed by some modern scholars, wished to identify C. with Cronus, but the hypothesis does not hold.
BIBL.: Roscher, s.V. in W. H. Roscher, Lexicon, I, 1, cols. 899 ff.; Waser, s. V. in Pauly-Wissowa, III, II, col. 2481 ff. Luisa Banti