Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss the three sons of Zeus who, had they reached adulthood, would have become more powerful than their father, who would have succeeded Zeus, either claiming the crown by force or ascending to the throne with their father's blessing.

Let's get into it.

In Greek mythology, from the beginning creation when Chaos, the great void, came into being, to the time of the Olympian gods and the rule of Zeus, there was a series of usurpations in which the son supplanted the father. Uranus, the personification of the sky, was the first king. His son, Cronus, ambushed and castrated him, seizing supremacy of the cosmos and becoming the second king. And Cronus' son, Zeus, led the Gods in the war against the Titans, a cataclysmic 10 year conflict that resulted in the defeat of the Titans, their imprisonment in Tartarus, and Zeus becoming the new king, the third king, of the cosmos.

With Zeus as the king of creation, it was almost as if the cosmos, its divine hierarchy, once plastic and prone to upheaval, had crystallised, satisfied with Zeus on the throne and no longer wishing for the cycle of son supplanting father to perpetuate. Giving credence to this is the fact that Zeus had three sons destined to be as or more powerful than himself and none of them survived past childhood: two of them prevented from being born and the third ripped to pieces by the Titans when he was just a boy.

We're going to spend the rest of the video going over the story of each of the three children who would have been more powerful than Zeus, these stories being those of the unnamed son nearly born to Thetis, the unnamed son nearly born to Metis, and Zagreus, whose life was brief and whose end was brutal.

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