Oceanus

Oceanus (Okeanos) was a Titan, the son of Uranus and Gaea, and the great river that Greek poets imagined flowing around the edge of the world. With his sister Tethys he fathered all the rivers and the three thousand Oceanids. In Homer he is the one “from whom the gods are sprung.”

Oceanus’ Birth

In Hesiod’s Theogony (132–133), Gaea lay with Uranus and bore deep-swirling Oceanus first among the twelve Titans, followed by Coeus, Crius and the rest. Apollodorus (Library 1.1.3) gives the same list of Uranus’ sons: Oceanus, Coeus, Hyperion, Crius, Iapetus and Cronus.

When Cronus attacked Uranus at Gaea’s urging, Apollodorus (1.1.4) says that all the Titans except Oceanus set upon their father. Oceanus is the one brother who stayed out of that crime, and he took no part in the Titans’ war against Zeus either: Hesiod says that his daughter Styx was the first to come to Zeus’ side, with her children, “through the counsel of her dear father” (Theogony 389–398).

Oceanus’ Family

Oceanus married his sister Tethys. Hesiod says that she bore him the swirling rivers, and then a separate and very large race of daughters, the Oceanids (Theogony 337–370). The Oceanids are three thousand light-stepping goddesses, scattered far and wide over the earth and the waters. The most eminent of them is Styx, the river of the oath of the gods; among the others are Metis, Doris, Electra, Eurynome, Perseis and Idyia. Their brothers are the rivers, which Hesiod also names one by one, among them the Nile, Alpheus, Eridanus, Scamander and Achelous.

Homer treats Oceanus as the source of all fresh water. In the Iliad (21.195–197), not even the great strength of Oceanus, from whom all rivers, the sea, springs and wells flow, is said to match the power of Zeus.

The Stream at the World’s Edge

In Homer, Oceanus is not a sea but a river that encircles the earth. The sun rises from his stream in the morning and sinks back into it at night (Iliad 7.421–423; 8.485), and the stars bathe in him (18.489). When Hephaestus finishes the shield of Achilles, he puts “the great might of the river Oceanus” around its outermost rim (Iliad 18.607–608), so that the stream surrounds the picture of the world just as it surrounds the world itself. Beyond him lie the lands of myth: Odysseus has to sail across Oceanus to reach the land of the Cimmerians and the entrance to the house of Hades (Odyssey 10.508–512; 11.13–22), and the Hesperides and the island of Erythia, where Geryon kept his cattle, were placed on his shores (Hesiod, Theogony 274–275, 287–294). Heracles crossed him in the golden goblet of Helios to fetch Geryon’s cattle; when Oceanus, to test him, made the goblet heave on the waves, Heracles was about to shoot him and the god, afraid, made him stop (Apollodorus 2.5.10).

Oceanus and Tethys also appear as the old couple who raised Hera. In book 14 of the Iliad, Hera tells Aphrodite, and later Zeus, that she is going to the limits of the all-nurturing earth to visit “Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, and mother Tethys” (14.200–204, repeated at 14.301–304). This is a cover story to get Aphrodite’s charm, but the way she says it shows how the poet thinks of the pair: as the oldest powers of the divine family, living far away at the edge of the world.

Oceanus and Prometheus

In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound the chorus is made up of his daughters, the Oceanids, who call themselves the offspring of Tethys and of the father whose sleepless current encircles the whole earth (136–140), and Oceanus himself appears as a character (lines 286–397). He visits the chained Prometheus and offers to plead with Zeus on his behalf, but he also cautions Prometheus to be more restrained toward the new ruler. Prometheus refuses the offer and advises Oceanus to keep out of trouble. The scene presents Oceanus as an elder god who sympathises with the sufferer but is unwilling to stand against Zeus.

Oceanus’ Portrayal

In the oldest sources Oceanus is a flowing stream rather than a figure with a body. When he is given a shape, it is that of a river god: Euripides speaks of “bull-headed Oceanus” (Orestes 1378), and in Greek and Roman art he appears as a bearded elder with horns or crab’s claws on his head, often with a serpentine fish tail, holding a rudder or a water jar. Later writers, who knew that the world was not a disc ringed by a river, came to think of him more simply as a sea god, and eventually as the personification of the sea itself.

See Also: Uranus, Gaea, Titans, Tethys, Prometheus, Hera, Styx, Cronus