Chronos was Time — and the Greek language unfortunately gave a near-identical name to a quite distinct Titan, Cronus the father of Zeus, with whom Time was repeatedly conflated in late antiquity and in the Western tradition descended from it. The two were originally separate. Chronos was a primordial power of the Orphic theogonies — the unaging principle of duration, paired with Ananke (Necessity), wound about the cosmic order from the beginning. The Orphic Hymns address him; the late Roman iconography of Chronos as a serpent-bound figure with the ages of man written upon him owes something to Orphic, something to Mithraic (the Aionic figure of the Mithraic mysteries), and something to the late conflation with Cronus the Titan, who in his Roman form Saturn had become the patron of the Saturnalia and an old man with a scythe — the prototype of the modern Father Time. The reader will benefit by holding firmly to the distinction in any pre-Hellenistic context: Chronos is Time, Cronus is the second-generation sky-king who castrated his father Uranus and was overthrown by his son Zeus.