Oceanus

Oceanus was the first-born of the Titans, the twelve children of Uranus, the starry Sky, and Gaia, the broad-breasted Earth, born in the age before gods and men. Where his brothers Cronus, Iapetus and Hyperion would one day scheme and fight, Oceanus was made of quieter stuff: he was the river itself, the vast and gently flowing stream that the Greeks imagined ringing the whole disc of the earth like a silver band, with all the lands and seas set inside it. Uranus hated his children from the moment they were born and thrust them back into the darkness of the Earth, and Gaia groaned under the weight of them. She fashioned a sickle of grey flint and begged her sons to punish their father. All of them hung back in fear except Cronus, the youngest and most cunning, and when Uranus descended at nightfall to lie with the Earth, Cronus struck and cut away his father's manhood. Every Titan joined the ambush except one: Oceanus, who stood apart from the deed, as he would stand apart from every war to come.

Years later, when Zeus, the youngest son of Cronus, rose up against his father and the old order in the ten-year war called the Titanomachy, the Titans chose sides once more, and once more Oceanus chose peace. While his brothers fought from their mountain and Zeus hurled thunderbolts from his, Oceanus kept to the edge of the world and let the heavens rage. His house even became a refuge. Rhea, the mother of Zeus, sent her daughter Hera to the halls of Oceanus and Tethys to be reared in safety while the war burned, and Hera remembered their kindness all her immortal life. Oceanus's family served the new king as well as any peace offering could. His eldest daughter Styx, the river of hatred whose black waters fall from a great cliff in the underworld, was the very first immortal to bring her children to Zeus's side, and Zeus rewarded her with the highest honour in heaven: from that day forward, the gods themselves would swear their unbreakable oaths by the water of Styx. A Titan's daughter had become the conscience of Olympus.

With Tethys, his sister and his queen, Oceanus fathered the largest family in all mythology: three thousand sons who are the rivers of the world, and three thousand daughters, the Oceanids, nymphs of springs, streams and clouds who tend the earth and watch over the young. The poet Hesiod, who first sang of the origins of the gods, could name only a fraction of them, but the greatest appear everywhere in the stories. There is Achelous, the horned river god of the largest river in Greece, who wrestled the hero Heracles for a bride and lost. There is Metis, the Oceanid of wise counsel, who became the first wife of Zeus and was swallowed by him when a prophecy warned that her son would overthrow his father; her daughter Athena, the goddess of wisdom, sprang fully armed from Zeus's head. There is Eurynome, mother of the three Graces, the goddesses of charm and beauty, and Doris, wife of the old sea god Nereus and mother of his fifty sea nymphs, the Nereids. There is Clymene, mother of the fire thief Prometheus, and Perseis, wife of the sun god Helios and mother of the enchantress Circe. Every river that waters a field and every spring that rises from the rock traces its bloodline back to Oceanus.

One scene shows his character better than any battle could. When the Titan Prometheus was chained to a crag in the Caucasus mountains for stealing fire from heaven and giving it to mankind, with an eagle sent each day to tear at his liver, the old river lord rode across the sea on a winged steed, part bird and part serpent, to visit his suffering nephew. In the tragedy staged by Aeschylus, the great playwright of fifth-century BCE Athens, Oceanus arrives gentle and worried, begging Prometheus to stop defying Zeus, warning him that the new king of heaven is harsh and that proud words only lengthen chains. He even offers to plead with Zeus on the rebel's behalf. But Prometheus mocks his caution and warns that pity is dangerous, and the old river god rides away as swiftly as he came, eager not to drown in another's punishment. Centuries later, when the smith god Hephaestus forged a new shield for the hero Achilles during the Trojan War, he hammered the whole world onto its face, the earth and sky, the sea and stars, cities at peace and cities at war, and around the outermost rim he poured the stream of Oceanus, holding the picture of the world together as the real Ocean holds the lands.

To the Greeks, Oceanus was not the sea but the father of the sea. The sun rose out of his stream each morning and sank into it each night, and each night the sun god Helios sailed back to the east in a golden cup along the river's dark course, ready to rise again. The stars bathed in his waters, the winds blew from his shores, and at the ends of the earth beside his stream lay the Elysian plain, the paradise where favoured heroes lived free of snow and storm. Roman artists pictured him as a grey-bearded old man with the claws of a crab upon his head and the tail of a sea serpent for legs, pouring water from a jar that never emptied. When Greek sailors passed beyond the Mediterranean and found waters greater than any they had known, they named them for the river that had always ringed the world, and the word ocean has carried his name ever since, into every atlas, every chart and every map of the seven seas.