Mythology of Saturn
The Romans identified Saturn with the Greek Cronus, whose myths were adapted for Latin literature and Roman art. In particular, Cronus's role in the genealogy of the Greek gods was transferred to Saturn. As early as Livius Andronicus (3rd century BC), Jupiter was called the son of Saturn.
Saturn had two consorts who represented different aspects of the god. The name of his wife Ops, the Roman equivalent of Greek Rhea, means "wealth, abundance, resources." The association with Ops though is considered a later development, as this goddess was originally paired with Consus. Earlier was Saturn's association with Lua ("destruction, dissolution, loosening"), a goddess who received the bloodied weapons of enemies destroyed in war.
Under Saturn's rule, humans enjoyed the spontaneous bounty of the earth without labor in a state of social egalitarianism, in the "Golden Age" described by Hesiod.
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“Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.”
—Humphrey, Mrs. Ward (1851–1920)
“From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leaped with him.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)