Metis, whose name means cunning intelligence or skilled counsel, occupies a strange and important place in the succession myth. First wife of Zeus and the helper who contrived the emetic that made Cronus disgorge the swallowed children, she was herself swallowed by Zeus when Gaia warned that she would bear a child mightier than its father, whereupon Athena sprang, fully armed, from Zeus's head. The myth is more than a curiosity: by taking metis into himself, Zeus internalizes practical wisdom and forecloses the cycle of sons overthrowing fathers that had toppled Uranus and Cronus, so that his reign is stable where theirs was not.
The episode is one of the clearest cases in Greek myth of an abstract quality personified, swallowed, and thereby made an attribute of the ruling god. Some interpreters, ancient and modern, read Zeus's swallowing of Metis as more than a single act of self-preservation, holding that Athena, born fully armed from her father's head, thereby carries her mother's own wisdom permanently within the ruling god, so that Metis is not so much destroyed as internalised, becoming, in effect, the hidden intelligence behind every subsequent judgement Zeus makes; ancient sources also credit Metis herself, before her marriage to Zeus, with contriving the emetic drink that first freed Zeus's swallowed siblings from Cronus, so her cunning shapes the succession myth at both its beginning and its climax.