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But here Hesiod has been anticipating the sequence of events, and forestalling, to this extent, the second stage of the poem. According to Hesiod, Cronus or Saturn was alive to the faults of his sire's policy of self-protection, and conceived an improvement in the means of checking revolutionary development on the part of his offspring, by imprisoning them in his own bowels rather than their mother's. Mindful of the destiny that "to his own child he should bow down his strength," he proceeded to swallow up his progeny with such regularity, that the maternal feelings of his consort, Rhea, roused her to a spirit of opposition. When about to be delivered of her sixth child, Zeus, she called in the aid of her parents, Heaven and Earth, in the concealment of his birth:—