The same pattern set down twenty-seven centuries ago by Hesiod still repeats today. Ouranos, the sky, pushed his newborn children back into the earth. His son Cronus escaped, overthrew him, and then swallowed his own children whole as each was born. Cronus’s son Zeus escaped, overthrew his father, and, warned that a son would someday do the same to him, swallowed his pregnant wife. Absolute power produced identical behavior across generations.
Each king behaved terribly, and each behaved rationally. Only one being can hold a throne, so every child born to a king is a future rival. The fear was structural. It arrived with the throne and lasted exactly as long as the throne, and no king escaped it. Zeus, remembered as the wise lawgiver, matched his father and his grandfather as soon as he heard the prophecy himself.
Zeus withheld fire from humanity, and when Prometheus carried it down anyway, the punishment ran for generations. Zeus guarded his monopoly on capability in every direction, against sons inside the house and species outside it.
The pattern repeats outside mythology. Whoever holds what others need treats each gain in their independence as a loss of control, and it is. The cruelty comes from the position. A new ruler in the same seat behaves like the old one.
The tellers never ended the pattern, because they could not picture a world without the throne. Heaven stayed a monarchy, and the anxious king stayed anxious forever. A prophecy of succession needs a throne worth seizing. Capability spread into every hand leaves nothing to seize, and a king with nothing to guard is only a father.
— Chiaroscuro Joven