The Continent of Cronos

 

                            Well, one of the above is Francisco Goya's Kronos Devouring His Son.

In trying to recapture the magic of my college days, I've been writing notes on index cards and in notebooks as I did in the days of yore.  One of my (admittedly malleable) categories is "Mythical Lands", fantasy places which might be real in some Otherworld.

Having mentioned it in a story, I decided to scribble notes on "The Continent of Cronos."  Briefly, according to Greek mythology, after Zeus overthrew his father Cronos [or Cronus, Kronos, etc.], he exiled the tyrannical Titan to a place far to the west, beyond the limits of the Greeks' known world, an extensive land known only as the "Continent of Cronos."

I decided to find an authentic reference to this fragment, just as I found similar tid-bits in old texts and journals at college.  It ought to be easy, I thought, since it appears early in the Grecian timeline -- probably in Chapter One of any book on Greek Myth.

I flipped through Apollodorus' Library of Greek Mythology but did not find the anecdote.  I looked well into the night through Gertrude Jobes' Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore, and Symbols, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hesiod's Theogony, Graves' The Greek Myths, to no avail.  I finally found the reference I wanted in Plutarch's Moralia, in an essay called "Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon."

Cripes, I'm putting as much effort into writing up a couple of 4" x 6" cards as I would writing an actual article, I thought.  And my articles are often long in appearing because I want them to be the most thoroughly researched essays ever!  Oh, well -- when I churn out enough articles, sketches, anecdotes and essays, maybe I can divide them into categories and publish them as a series of books.