Oceanus (
Greek:
Ὠκεανός, lit. "ocean") was believed to be the
world-ocean in
classical antiquity, which the
ancient Romans and
Greeks considered to be an enormous
river encircling the world. Strictly speaking, Okeanos was the
ocean-stream at the
Equator in which floated the habitable
hemisphere (
oikoumene οἰκουμένη). In
Greek mythology, this world-ocean was personified as a
Titan, a son of
Uranus and
Gaia. In Hellenistic and Roman mosaics, this Titan was often depicted as having the upper body of a muscular man with a long beard and horns (often represented as the claws of a crab), and the lower torso of a
serpent (cf.
Typhon). On a fragmentary archaic vessel (British Museum 1971.11-1.1) of ca 580 BC, among the gods arriving at the wedding of
Peleus and the sea-nymph
Thetis, is a fish-tailed Oceanus, with a fish in one hand and a serpent in the other, gifts of bounty and prophecy. In Roman mosaics he might carry a steering-oar and cradle a ship.
Some scholars believe that Oceanus originally represented all bodies of salt water, including the
Mediterranean Sea and the
Atlantic Ocean, the two largest bodies known to the ancient Greeks. However, as geography became more accurate, Oceanus came to represent the stranger, more unknown waters of the Atlantic Ocean (also called the "
Ocean Sea"), while the newcomer of a later generation,
Poseidon, ruled over the Mediterranean.
Oceanus' consort is his sister
Tethys, and from their union came the ocean
nymphs, also known as the three-thousand
Oceanids, and all the rivers of the world, fountains, and lakes. From
Cronus, of the race of Titans, the
Olympian gods have their birth, and
Hera mentions twice in
Iliad book xiv her intended journey "to the ends of the generous earth on a visit to Okeanos, whence the gods have risen, and Tethys our mother who brought me up kindly in their own house."
In most variations of the war between the Titans and the
Olympians, or
Titanomachy, Oceanus, along with
Prometheus and
Themis, did not take the side of his fellow Titans against the Olympians, but instead withdrew from the conflict. In most variations of this myth, Oceanus also refused to side with
Cronus in the latter's revolt against their father,
Uranus.
In the
Iliad, the rich iconography of
Achilles' shield, which was fashioned by
Hephaestus, is enclosed, as the world itself was believed to be, by Oceanus:
When
Odysseus and
Nestor walk together along the shore of the sounding sea (
Iliad ix.182) their prayers are addressed "to the great Sea-god who girdles the world." It is to Oceanus, not to Poseidon, that their thoughts are directed.
Invoked in passing by poets and figured as the father of rivers and streams, thus the progenitor of
river gods, Oceanus appears only once in myth, as a representative of the archaic world that
Heracles constantly threatened and bested. Heracles forced the loan from Helios of his golden bowl, in order to cross the wide expanse of the Ocean on his trip to the
Hesperides. When Oceanus tossed the bowl, Heracles threatened him and stilled his waves. The journey of Heracles in the sun-bowl upon Oceanus was a favored theme among painters of Attic pottery.
In cosmography
Oceanus appears in Hellenic cosmography as well as myth. Cartographers continued to represent the encircling equatorial stream much as it had appeared on
Achilles' shield.
Though
Herodotus was skeptical about the physical existence of Oceanus, he rejected snowmelt as a cause of the annual flood of the
Nile river; according to his translator and interpreter,
Livio Catullo Stecchini, he left unsettled the question of an equatorial Nile, since the geography of
Sub-Saharan Africa was unknown to him.
Apollonius of Rhodes calls the lower Danube the
Keras Okeanoio (Gulf or Horn of Okeanos) in
Argonautica (IV. 282).
Accion (Ocean) in 4th Century Gaulish was used to denote great lakes (Rufus
Avienus,
Ora maritima / after Mullerus in Cl. Ptolemaei Geographia, Ed. Didot, p.235).
Both
Homer (
Odyssey, XII. 1) and
Hesiod (
Theogonia, v.242. 959) refer to
Okeanos Potamos, the "Ocean Stream",
Hecateus of Abdera writes that the
Okeanos of the Hyperboreans is neither the Arctic Ocean nor Western Ocean, but the sea located to the north of the ancient Greek world, called
the most admirable of all seas by
Herodotus (lib. IV 85), called the "immense sea" by
Pomponius Mela (lib. I. c. 19) and by
Dionysius Periegetes (
Orbis Descriptio, v. 165), and which is named
Mare majus on medieval geographic maps.
At the end of the Okeanos Potamos, is the holy island of Alba (Leuke, Pytho Nisi, Isle of Snakes), sacred to the Pelasgian (and later, Greek)
Apollo, greeting the sun rising in the east.
Hecateus of Abdera refers to
Apollo's island from the region of the Hyperboreans, in the Okeanos. It was on Leuke, in one version of his legend, that the hero
Achilles, in a hilly tumulus, was buried (to this day, one of the mouths of the
Danube is called Chilia).
Leto, the Hyperborean goddess after nine days and nine nights of labour on the island of Delos (Pelasgian for hill, related to
tell) "gave birth to the great god of the antique light" (
Pseudo-Apollodorus,
Bibliotheca, I. 4.1). Old Romanian folk songs sing of a white monastery on a white island with nine priests, nine singers, nine altars, on a part of the
Black Sea known as the White Sea.
[, Nicolae Densusianu (1913).]Argive genealogy in Greek mythology
See also
