- Thetis
:"This article is about the Greek sea nymph. Thetis should not be confused with
Themis , the embodiment of the laws of nature, but see the sea-goddess Tethys. For other uses, seeThetis (disambiguation) "."Silver-footed Thetis (ancient Greek polytonic|Θέτις), " disposer" or "placer" (the one who places), is a sea
nymph , one of the fiftyNereid s, daughters of "the ancient one of the seas" in the historical vestiges of mostGreek mythology . When described as a Nereid, Thetis was the daughter ofNereus andDoris (Hesiod , "Theogony"), and a granddaughter of Tethys. It is likely, however, that she was one of the earliest of deities worshiped in Archaic Greece, about whom written records do not exist except for one fragment, an earlyAlcman hymn which identifies Thetis as the creator of the universe and worship of Thetis as the goddess is documented to have persisted in some regions.Thetis as goddess
While most extant material about Thetis concerns her role as mother of
Achilles and, as such, she is largely a creature of poetic fancy rather than cult worship in the historical period, there is one notable exception (see "Thetis in Laconia" below); a few fragmentary hints and references suggest an older layer of the tradition, in which the sea-goddess Thetis played a far more central role in the religious beliefs, practices, and imagination of some of the archaic Greeks. The pre-modern etymology of her name, from "tithemi" (τίθημι), "to set up, establish," suggests the perception among Classical Greeks of an early political role.Walter Burkert [Burkert, "The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age", 1993, pp 92-93.] considers her name a transformed doublet of Tethys.In "Iliad" I, Achilles recalls to his mother her role in defending, and thus legitimizing, the reign of Zeus against an incipient rebellion by three Olympians, each of whom has pre-Olympian roots::"You alone of all the gods saved Zeus the Darkener of the Skies from an inglorious fate, when some of the other Olympians—Hera ,Poseidon , andPallas Athene —had plotted to throw him into chains... You, goddess, went and saved him from that indignity. You quickly summoned to high Olympus the monster of the hundred arms whom the gods callBriareus , but mankindAegaeon , [The "goatish one"] a giant more powerful even than his father. He squatted by the Son of Cronos with such a show of force that the blessed gods slunk off in terror, leaving Zeus free" (E.V. Rieu translation). Thus, evidence of major changes in religious concepts may be recorded only in fragments of myths that supersede and later, obscure the originals.Quintus of Smyrna , recalling this passage, does write that Thetis once released Zeus from chains; [The chains are a metaphor for impotence among the "deathless gods":Mircea Eliade , "Images and Symbols" (tr. 1969), chapter3 "The 'God who Binds' and the symbolism of knots" pp92-124.] but there is no other reference to this rebellion among the Olympians, and some readers, such as M. M. Willcock, [M. M. Willcock, "Ad Hoc Invention in the "Iliad"," "Harvard Studies in Classical Philology" 81 (1977), pp. 41-53.] have understood the episode as an "ad hoc" invention of Homer's to support Achilles' request that his mother intervene with Zeus. Laura Slatkin explores the apparent contradiction, in that the immediate presentation of Thetis in the "Iliad" is as a helpless minor goddess overcome by grief and lamenting to her Nereid sisters, and links the goddess's present and past through her grief. [Laura M. Slatkin, "The Wrath of Thetis" "Transactions of the American Philological Association" (1974)116 (1986), pp 1-24.] She draws comparisons with Thetis' role in another work of theepic Cycle concerning Troy, the lost "Aethiopis ", [The summary byProclus survives.] which presents a strikingly similar relationship—that of the divine Dawn,Eos , with her slain sonMemnon ; she supplements the parallels with images from the repertory of archaic vase-painters, where Eros and Thetis flank the symmetrically opposed heroes with a theme that may have been derived from traditional epic songs. ["When Achilles fights with Memnon, the two divine mothers, Thetis and Eos, rush to the scene—this was probably the subject of a pre-Iliad epic song, and it also appears on one of the earliest mythological vase paintings." (Walter Burkert , "Greek Religion" 1985, p 121.] Thetis does not need to appeal to Zeus for immortality for her son, but snatches him away to the White Island "Leuke" in theBlack Sea , an alternateElysium [Erwin Rohde calls the isle of Leuke a "sonderelysion" in "Psyche: Seelen Unsterblickkeitsglaube der Grieche" (1898) 3:371, noted by Slatkin 1986:4note.] where he has transcended death, and where an Achilles cult lingered into historic times.Thetis and the other deities
Pseudo-Apollodorus' "
Bibliotheke " asserts that Thetis was courted by bothZeus andPoseidon , but she was married off to the mortalPeleus because of their fears about the prophecy byThemis [Pindar , Eighth Isthmian Ode.] (orPrometheus , orCalchas , according to others) that her son would become greater than his father. Thus, she is revealed as a figure of cosmic capacity, quite capable of unsettling the divine order (Slatkin 1986:12).When
Hephaestus was thrown from Olympus, whether cast out by Hera for his lameness or evicted by Zeus for taking Hera's side, theNereids Eurynome and Thetis caught him and cared for him on the volcanic isle ofLemnos , while he labored for them as a smith, "working there in the hollow of the cave, and the stream ofOkeanos around us went on forever with its foam and its murmur" ("Iliad" 18.369).Thetis is not successful in her role protecting and nurturing a hero (the theme of "kourotrophos"), but her role in succouring deities is emphatically repeated by Homer, in three "Iliad" episodes: as well as her rescue of Zeus (1.396ff) and Hephaestus (18.369) , Diomedes recalls that when Dionysus was expelled by
Lycurgus with the Olympians' aid, he took refuge in the Erythraean Sea with Thetis in a bed of seaweed (6.123ff). These accounts associate Thetis with "a divine past—uninvolved with human events—with a level of divine invulnerability extraordinary by Olympian standards. Where within the framework of the "Iliad" the ultimate recourse is to Zeus for protection, here the poem seems to point to an alternative structure of cosmic relations" [Slatkin 1986:10.] and the reference relates to the religious concepts that greatly ante-dated the classical period.Marriage to Peleus and the Trojan War
An essential subordinate motif in the nature of Thetis, as a Nereid, one that links her with the dawn Titan
Eos and withAphrodite , is her liaison with a mortal lover: Thetis is the mother ofAchilles byPeleus , king of theMyrmidons .Zeus had received a prophecy that Thetis's son would become greater than his father, the familiarmytheme of the Succession Prophecy. [Zeus himself would lead the list of other sons "fated" to be greater than their fathers.] Therefore, in order to ensure a mortal father for her eventual offspring,Zeus and his brotherPoseidon made arrangements for her marriage to a man,Peleus , son ofAeacus , but she refused him.Chiron , the wise centaur, who would later be tutor to her son by Peleus, Achilles, advised Peleus to find the sea nymph when she was asleep and bind her tightly to keep her from escaping by changing form. She did shift shapes, becoming flame, water, a raging lioness, and a serpent [Ovid:Metamorphoses xi, 221ff.; Sohpocles: Troilus, quoted by scholiast on Pindar's Nemean Odes iii. 35; Apollodorus: iii, 13.5; Pindar: Nemean Odes iv .62; Pausanias: v.18.1] (compare the sea-godProteus ), but Peleus held fast. She then consented to marry him.According to classical mythology, the wedding of Thetis and Peleus was celebrated on Mount
Pelion outside the cave of Chiron and attended by the deities: there they celebrated the marriage with feasting. Apollo played the lyre and theMuses sang,Pindar claimed. At the wedding Chiron gave Peleus an ashen spear that had been polished by Athene and had a blade forged by Hepphaestus, and Poseidon gave him the immortal horses,Balius andXanthus . Eris, the goddess of discord, had not been invited, however. In spite, she threw a golden apple into the midst of the goddesses that was to be awarded only "to the fairest." (In most interpretations, the award was made during theJudgement of Paris and eventually occasioned theTrojan War ; by others such asRobert Graves , the imagery is considered misinterpreted and it is thought that it should reflect the selection of a king to be sacrificed in a sacred ritual).In the classical myths Thetis worked her magic on the baby Achilles by night, burning away his mortality in the hall fire and anointing the child with
ambrosia during the day, Apollonius tells. When Peleus caught her searing the baby, he let out a cry.:"Thetis heard him, and catching up the child threw him screaming to the ground, and she like a breath of wind passed swiftly from the hall as a dream and leapt into the sea, exceeding angry, and thereafter returned never again."In a variant of the myth, Thetis tried to make Achilles invulnerable by dipping him in the waters of the Styx (the river of
Hades ). However, the heel by which she held him was not touched by the Styx's waters, and failed to be protected. In the story of Achilles in theTrojan War in the "Iliad ",Homer does not mention this weakness of Achilles' heel.A similar myth of immortalizing a child in fire is connected to
Demeter ; compare the myth ofMeleager . Some myths relate that because she had been interrupted by Peleus, Thetis had not made her son physically invulnerable. His heel, which she was about to burn away when her husband stopped her, had not been protected. Alternative interpretations assert that substitutes for the sacred king were sacrificed by fire (or water), putting off their ritual sacrifice for various numbers of years. Peleus gave the boy toChiron to raise. Prophecy said that the son of Thetis would have either a long but dull life, or a glorious but brief life. When the Trojan War broke out, Thetis was anxious and concealed Achilles, disguised as a girl, at the court ofLycomedes . When Odysseus found that one of the girls at court was not a girl, but Achilles, he dressed as a merchant and set up a table of vanity items and jewellery and called to the group.Only Achilles picked up the golden sword that lay to one side, and Odysseus quickly revealed him to be the warrior. Seeing that she could no longer prevent her son from realizing his destiny, Thetis then had
Hephaestus make a shield and armor.When Achilles was killed by Paris [http://experts.about.com/e/t/th/Thetis.htm] , Thetis came from the sea with the Nereids to mourn him, and she collected his ashes in a golden urn, raised a monument to his memory, and instituted commemorative festivals. According to alternative interpretations suggesting archaic traditions, Paris would have been the succeeding sacred king who was selected next by the three goddesses.
Thetis worship in Laconia and other places
The one noted exception to the general observation resulting from the existing historical records, that Thetis was not venerated by cult, was in conservative
Laconia , where Pausanias was informed that there had beenpriestess es of Thetis in archaic times, when a cult that was centered on a woodencult image of Thetis (a "xoanon "), which preceded the building of the oldest temple; by the intervention of a highly-placed woman, her cult had been refounded with a temple; and in the second century AD she was still being worshipped with utmost reverence. According to Pausanias, "The Lacedaemonians were making war against the Messenians, who had revolted, and their king Anaxander, having invaded Messenia, took prisoners certain women, and among them Cleo, priestess of Thetis. This Cleo the wife of Anaxander asked for from her husband, and discovering that she had the wooden image of Thetis, she set up with her a temple for the goddess. This Leandris did because of a vision in a dream, but the wooden image of Thetis is guarded in secret." [Pausanias, "Description of Greece" 3.14.4-5]In one fragmentary hymn [The papyrus fragment was found at
Oxyrhynchus .] by the seventh centurySparta n poetAlcman , Thetis appears as ademiurge , beginning her creation with "poros" (πόρος) "path, track" and "tekmor" (τέκμωρ) "marker, end-post". Third was "skotos" (σκότος) "darkness", and then the sun and moon. A close connection has been argued between Thetis andMetis , another shape-shifting sea-power beloved by Zeus with a son greater than his father. [M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, "Les Ruses de l'intelligence: la métis des Grecs" (Paris, 1974) pp 127-64, noted in Slatkin 1986:14note.] This cosmogony is interesting not only because it takes up Near Eastern astronomical and theological speculation, but also because its first principles are the building-blocks of a race-track, reflecting the athletic preoccupations of Spartan society and education.Herodotus [Herodotus "Histories" 6.1.191.] noted that thePersians sacrificed to "Thetis" at Cape Sepias. By the process of "interpretatio graeca ", Herodotus identifies as the familiar Hellenic "Thetis" a sea-goddess who was being propitiated by the Persians.Thetis in modern culture
In 1981, British actress
Maggie Smith portrayed Thetis in theRay Harryhausen film "Clash of the Titans " from which she won aSaturn Award . In the film she acts as antagonist to the heroPerseus for the mistreatment of her son Calibos.In 2004, veteran actress
Julie Christie portrayed Thetis in a short scene in the film " Troy", in which her sonAchilles , portrayed byBrad Pitt , featured heavily. During her entire scene, she was standing in an ocean pool.Notes
References
Homer 's "Iliad " makes many references to Thetis;
*Apollonius Rhodius , "Argonautica " IV, 770-879,
*Apollodorus , "The Library " 3.13.5
*In an unusual appearance in modern popular culture, Thetis appears as a character in "Clash of the Titans ", portrayed byMaggie Smith .External links
* [http://www.theoi.com/Pontos/Thetis.html Thetis] : very full classical references
* [http://24.24.31.212/literature/POL-HS-Peleus-Thetis.htm Peleus and Thetis]]
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