Chronos ("time," also transliterated as Khronos or Latinized as Chronus) is the personification of Time in pre-Socratic philosophy and later literature. Chronos was imagined as a god, serpentine in form, with three heads—those of a man, a bull, and a lion. He and his consort, serpentine Ananke (Inevitability), circled the primal world egg in their coils and split it apart to form the ordered universe of earth, sea and sky.