Oceanus

The eldest of the Titans

The early Greek poet Hesiod, whose Theogony sets out the birth of the gods, begins the Titans with Oceanus. Earth lies with Heaven, and the first child named is deep-swirling Oceanus, ahead of Coeus, Crius, Hyperion and Iapetus. Cronus is born last of that brood. The Greek of the line gives the name as Okeanos and the epithet as bathydines, deep-swirling.

The order holds in a second ancient list. Apollodorus, a compiler who gathered the myths into a handbook, names the Titans in much the same sequence: Ocean first, then Coeus, Hyperion, Crius and Iapetus, with Cronus youngest of all.

The river at the edge of the world

What Oceanus is, in the earliest poems, is a geography. The earth is a disc and his water runs round the rim of it. In the Iliad, the epic of the Trojan War, the hero Achilles names him deep-flowing Ocean, the water every river, every sea, every spring and every well comes out of.

The same poem draws him. When the smith god Hephaestus makes a shield for Achilles, he sets the great might of the river Oceanus around the uttermost rim of it, the outer band of a world in metal.

The same speech of Achilles gives the limit of that power. Even Ocean, he says, has fear of the lightning of great Zeus.

The rivers, and the 3,000 daughters

Oceanus has a wife, Tethys, and between them they account for most of the water that carries a name. In Hesiod, Tethys bears the eddying rivers to Oceanus, and the list runs from the Nile and the Alpheus through the Eridanus, the Strymon and the Achelous to the Scamander.

The daughters are 3,000, dispersed far and wide across the earth and the deep waters. Hesiod names a company of them and leaves the rest uncounted, with Doris, Metis, Eurynome, Calypso and Europa among the number.

The eldest is Styx. Hesiod puts her house below the earth, near the halls of Hades, and makes her water the oath of the gods. A branch of Oceanus flows under the earth through the dark night, and a tenth part of his water is allotted to her. A god who pours a libation of it and swears falsely lies breathless for a full year, then spends nine more cut off from the councils and the feasts.

The god who stays away

In the Iliad, Zeus bids the goddess Themis summon the gods to his house on Olympus. The rivers come, and the nymphs of the groves and the springs come. There was no river that came not, the poem says, save only Oceanus.

Hera, the wife of Zeus, says that Rhea gave her up to Oceanus and mother Tethys at the limits of the earth, when Zeus thrust Cronus below the earth and the sea, and that the pair nursed and cherished her in their own halls. The same speech calls Oceanus the one the gods are sprung from.

The one surviving play in which he speaks is the Prometheus Bound, ascribed to the Greek dramatist Aeschylus. Oceanus arrives on a winged steed at the rock where the Titan Prometheus is bound, guided by his own will and without a bridle. Kinship constrains him to pity, he says, and he asks what aid he can render: Prometheus will never say he has a friend more loyal than Oceanus.

Two pictures of one water

Hesiod does not hold to one shape for him. Where Styx is introduced, Ocean is backflowing, a single stream that encircles the earth and the seas and so runs back into itself. Fourteen lines later he winds about the earth and the sea’s wide back with nine silver-swirling streams and falls into the main, with a tenth flowing out from a rock as the oath-water. Modern scholars read the two passages as two different conceptions of the same water.

The son whose water runs through Olympia

Olympia reaches Oceanus through a son. The Alpheus is a child of Oceanus and Tethys, and it is the Alpheus whose water the sanctuary stands beside. Olympia lies in the valley made where the Alpheios and the Kladeos meet. Pausanias, who walked the site and wrote down what was in it, describes the Alpheius there as a large and very pleasant river fed by several tributaries, seven of them important, and the Cladeus comes from Elis to meet it. Dikes along the river south of the sanctuary hold it off the ruins.

Among the altars of the Altis, the sacred enclosure, Pausanias records one where the Eleans sacrificed to Alpheius and Artemis together, and a second to Alpheius alone, near an altar of Hephaestus that some Eleans called the altar of Warlike Zeus.

He also gives the river its own story. The Alpheius was a hunter changed into water by love for Arethusa, a huntress turned into a spring, and Pausanias holds that the river crosses the sea to mingle with her spring at Ortygia, because the oracle at Delphi says so.