The Titans are twelve in number (in Hesiod's version) and the brothers and sisters form six couples. Kronos, who has taken his father's position of kingship, mates with his sister Rhea. Kronos is almost certainly not an Indo-European name, but he was thoroughly assimilated into Greek culture, and was worshipped into Classical times. Rhea was an Earth goddess, always closely associated with her mother, Gaia.

Kronos and Rhea have six children. Again fearing usurpation, Kronos swallows his children as they are born. The last-born male (in Hesiod's version), Zeus, is spirited away by Rhea. She substitutes a stone for Zeus and hides the baby in a cave. The cave in which Zeus was hidden was claimed by many locales, but the two dominant traditions look to Crete. One tradition looks to a cave on Mt. Ida, the other on Mt. Dikte. Thus the Greek Zeus is syncretized with Minoan tradition. With this Minoan influence the "Cretan" Zeus developed very differently than on the mainland. Among other differences, he became a dieing and reviving god. In Classical times, visitors to Crete from the Greek mainland were sometimes outraged to be shown the tomb of their immortal god!

Zeus is guarded by the Kuretes, a group of young warriors who bang their shields when the baby cries in order to hide the sound from Kronos. There has been considerable discussion about the nature of the Kuretes. Some would see their origin in Indo-European warrior cults. Far more likely, they are related to the Middle Eastern cults of male devotees to a goddess, here transferred to a male.

The infant Zeus is fed honey by bees and milk by the goat Amaltheia. In gratitude Zeus later turns her into a constellation. Most "astro-myths," probably including this one, are relatively late, largely literary appendages; that is, constellations were assigned to pre-existing narratives, or etiologies were invented. The general level of belief was probably low, and with rare exception these astro-myths do not occur in the context of other mythic narratives.

Before sending her into the heavens, Zeus crafts his aegis from her skin. As a common noun, an aegis is simply a goatskin cloak -- everyday herder's apparel still seen today in the mountains of Greece. With Zeus's rise in prominence, this humble garment apparently was deemed inappropriate, and the aegis was transformed into a mystical shield of impenetrable defense. Sometimes it was portrayed as lightning, more often as a shield. Perhaps because Athena sometimes borrowed her father Zeus' aegis, her own shield (often shown as being mounted with the head of Medusa) was sometimes called an aegis.

In terms of Dumezil's New Comparativism, the loyalty to the ruler Zeus of the Kuretes and Amaltheia, symbols of the warrior and peasant class, respectively, validates and confirms the "proper" relationship among the three moieties of Indo-European society.

Zeus survives to adulthood and forces his father Kronos to regurgitate Zeus' siblings. The six siblings are the females Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, and the males Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. The non-Indo-European Titans give birth to six gods who bear Indo-European names, another example of syncretism in Greek myth.