Oceanus

Oceanus
Oceanus
Oceanus in the Trevi Fountain, Rome
Oceanus in the Trevi Fountain, Rome
Titan of Water, Seas, Lakes, Rivers, Oceans, Streams and Ponds
Abode Arcadia
Symbol Ocean, Sea and Waters
Consort Tethys
Parents Uranus and Gaia[1]
Siblings Tethys, Cronus, Rhea, Theia, Hyperion, Themis, Crius, Mnemosyne, Coeus, Phoebe, Iapetus, The Cyclopes and The Hundred-Handers
Children Thetis, Metis, Amphitrite, Dodone, Pleione, Neda, Nephele, Amphiro and the Other Oceanids and Inachus, Amnisos and the Other Potamoi

Oceanus (play /ˈsənəs/); Ancient Greek: Ὠκεανός, Ōkeanós,[2] pronounced [ɔːkeanós]) was a pseudo-geographical feature in classical antiquity, believed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to be the world-ocean, an enormous river encircling the world.

Strictly speaking, Oceanus was the ocean-stream at the Equator in which floated the habitable hemisphere (οἰκουμένη, oikoumene).[3] 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 body of a serpent (cf. Typhon). On a fragmentary archaic vessel of circa 580 BC (British Museum 1971.11-1.1), 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, such as that from Bardo (illustration below) he might carry a steering-oar and cradle a ship.

Roman mosaic from Bardo, 2nd century CE

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.[4] 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 Oceanus, whence the gods have risen, and Tethys our mother who brought me up kindly in their own house."[5]

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.

Contents

Excerpts from Hesiod and Homer

This excerpt regards Oceanus's role in the Titanomachy:

After the first Dionysus [Zagreus] had been slaughtered, Father Zeus ... attacked the mother of the Titanes [Gaia the Earth] with avenging brand, and shut up the murderers of horned Dionysus [the Titans dismembered the godling Zagreus] within the gate of Tartarus [after a long war]: the trees blazed, the hair of suffering Gaia (Earth) was scorched with heat . . . Now Okeanos poured rivers of tears from his watery eyes, a libation of suppliant prayer. Then Zeus claimed his wrath at the sight of the scorched earth; he pitied her, and wished to wash with water the ashes of ruin and the fiery wounds of the land. Then Rainy Zeus covered the whole sky with clouds and flooded all the earth [in the Great Deluge of Deukalion].
—Nonnus, Dionysiaca 6. 155 ff)[1]

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:

Then, running round the shield-rim, triple-ply,
he pictured all the might of the Ocean stream.

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.[6] 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, at right, with scaly tail, in the Gigantomachy of the Pergamon Altar.

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.[7]

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 Oceanus) in Argonautica (IV. 282).

Accion (Ocean) in the fourth century Gaulish Latin of Rufus Avienus', Ora maritima, was applied to great lakes.[8]

Both Homer (Odyssey, XII. 1) and Hesiod (Theogonia, v.242. 959) refer to Okeanos Potamos, the "Ocean Stream",

Hecateus of Abdera writes that the Oceanus 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 Oceanus. 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.[9]

Argive genealogy in Greek mythology

Argive genealogy in Greek mythology
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Uranus
 
Gaia
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Cronus
 
Rhea
 
Oceanus
 
Tethys
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Memphis
 
 
Libya
 
Poseidon
 
 
 
Nilus
 
Inachus
 
Melia
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Belus
 
Agenor
 
 
 
Telephassa
 
 
Phoroneus
 
Io
 
Zeus
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Cadmus
 
Cilix
 
Europa
 
Phoenix
 
Achiroe
 
 
 
Epaphus
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Harmonia
 
 
Danaus
 
Aegyptus
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Polydorus
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Agave
 
 
Hypermnestra
 
Lynceus
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Autonoë
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Ino
 
 
 
 
Abas
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Semele
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Acrisius
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Danaë
 
Zeus
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Perseus
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

See also

References

  1. ^ a b http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanOkeanos.html
  2. ^ Ὠκεανός, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, at Perseus project
  3. ^ See Stecchini, "Ancient Cosmology".
  4. ^ The late classical poet Nonnus mentioned "the Limnai [Lakes)], liquid daughters of Oceanus." (Nonnus, Dionysiaca 6.352)
  5. ^ Iliad xiv. 200 and 244.
  6. ^ The Suda identifies Oceanus and Tethys as the parents of the two Kerkopes, whom Heracles also bested.
  7. ^ http://www.metrum.org/mapping/cosmol.htm
  8. ^ Mullerus in Cl. Ptolemaei Geographia, ed. Didot, p. 235.
  9. ^ Dacia Preistorica, Nicolae Densusianu (1913).

Sources

  • Karl Kerenyi. The Gods of the Greeks. Thames and Hudson, 1951.

External links


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Look at other dictionaries:

  • Oceanus — O*ce a*nus, n. [L., from Gr. ?.] (Gr.Myth.) The god of the great outer sea, or the river which was believed to flow around the whole earth. [1913 Webster] …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  • Oceanus — Oceănus, s. Okeanos …   Kleines Konversations-Lexikon

  • Oceanus — Oceanus, Okeanos, in der griech. Mythe ein Titan, der als mächtiger Strom die Welt umschlingt, der Vater aller Quellen und Flüsse, der Oceaniden, Nymphen aller aus dem Ocean strömen den unterirdischen Wasser …   Herders Conversations-Lexikon

  • Oceanus — [ō sē′ə nəs] n. [L < Gr Ōkeanos: see OCEAN] Gr. Myth. 1. a Titan, father of the Oceanides and ruler of the sea before Poseidon 2. the great outer stream supposedly encircling the earth …   English World dictionary

  • OCEANUS — I. OCEANUS Caeli et Vestae filius, maris Deus, maritus Tethyos, fluviorum, fontiumque omnium pater; sic dictus ab Ὠκὺς, quod est velox, quod praeter SErvium testatur Solinus c. 36. his verbis: Nam Ὠκεανὸς, inquit, quem Graeci sic nominant a… …   Hofmann J. Lexicon universale

  • Oceanus — /oh see euh neuhs/, n. Class. Myth. 1. a Titan who was the son of Uranus and Gaea, the consort of Tethys, and the father of the river gods and Oceanids. 2. a great stream of water encircling the earth and believed to be the source of all rivers,… …   Universalium

  • Oceanus — Mega Express Three Mega Express Three Noms : Oceanus Ariadne Palace I Ariadne Palace One Type : Ferry Histoire …   Wikipédia en Français

  • Oceanus, S. — S. Oceanus (4. Sept.), ein Martyrer, dessen auch griech. Martyrologien gedenken. S. S. Theodorus. (II. 207.) …   Vollständiges Heiligen-Lexikon

  • Oceanus Procellarum — is the large mare in the center and upper left of this image. Visible in the upper right is another large mare, Imbrium, and below is the small round Mare Humorum. Coordinates …   Wikipedia

  • Oceanus Procellarum — ist die dunkelgraue Mondregion von der Mitte bis oben links. Oben grenzt sie an Mare Frigoris, oben rechts an das große Mare Imbrium, unten rechts ans Mare Nubium und im Süden ans runde Mare Humorum …   Deutsch Wikipedia

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