Tethys

Last of the Titan sisters

The early Greek poet Hesiod, whose Theogony sets out the birth of the gods, puts Tethys at the end of the Titan daughters. Earth lies with Heaven, the daughters are named in turn, and gold-crowned Phoebe comes just before lovely Tethys. After them Cronos is born, youngest of the brood and the most terrible of his mother’s children. The Greek of the line gives her name as Tethys and her epithet as erateine, lovely.

A second ancient list puts her elsewhere. The Library of Apollodorus names the Titanides, the Titan daughters, and places Tethys first of them rather than last. That list also carries Dione, a name Hesiod keeps for one of the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys instead.

The mother of the rivers

In Hesiod, the first of Tethys’s children are the rivers. She bears the eddying rivers to Oceanus, her husband. The list opens with the Nile and the Alpheus, and goes on through the deep-swirling Eridanus, the Strymon, the Meander and the Ister.

The Greek names her again at the end of that passage. The rivers are the sons of Ocean, whom potnia Tethys bore, queenly Tethys. As many other rivers are there, it says, babbling as they flow, and their names are hard for a mortal man to tell, though people know the ones they live beside.

The daughters past counting

The daughters come next, a holy company whom Zeus appointed to have the young in their keeping, with the lord Apollo and the Rivers. He names them in a long line, Doris and Metis and Eurynome, Calypso, Asia, Europa and Dione among them, with Styx the chiefest of them all.

Those are only the eldest. There are 3,000 neat-ankled daughters of Ocean in all, the poem says, dispersed far and wide, serving the earth and the deep waters in every place alike.

The goddess who reared Hera

Tethys appears in the Iliad in a speech of Hera. Hera, the daughter of Cronos, asks Aphrodite, the daughter of Zeus, for love and desire, the power by which gods and mortals alike are subdued. She wants it for a journey: she is going to the limits of the all-nurturing earth, to Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, and to mother Tethys, who lovingly nursed and cherished her in their halls. They took her in from Rhea, one of Tethys’s own sisters, Hera says, when Zeus, mightiest of the gods, thrust Cronos down to dwell beneath the earth and the unresting sea.

The pair at the world’s edge have held apart from the marriage-bed and from love for a long time now, in wrath, and Hera means to loose their endless strife and bring them back together. If she can persuade them, she says, she will be called dear by the two of them ever after, and worthy of reverence.

The Samians gave Hera a birthplace of their own. They held that she was born on their island, beside the river Imbrasus, under the willow that was still growing in the Heraeum, the island’s sanctuary of Hera, when Pausanias walked the site and wrote down what was in it.

Where the ancient lists disagree

Apollodorus names seven Oceanids of Ocean and Tethys: Asia, Styx, Electra, Doris, Eurynome, Amphitrite and Metis. Hesiod has all of them except Amphitrite, whom he counts among the Nereids, the daughters of Nereus, an old god of the sea. Amphitrite therefore belongs to Tethys in one ancient account and not in the other.

A different ancient account, the dialogue Timaeus by the Athenian philosopher Plato, moves her a whole generation. There, of Earth and Heaven come Oceanus and Tethys, and of those two come Phorkys, Cronos, Rhea and all who go with them. Tethys is the mother of Cronos in that line, where in Hesiod she is his sister. The dialogue says it is following the account of the children of gods rather than arguing for it.