Tethys (mythology)
Hesiod counted three thousand river gods, and another three thousand Oceanids, among the children of the Titan Tethys. In his telling, three thousand simply means too many to count. Yet the mother of this vast family has almost no story of her own. Greek mythology gives her no active role, and no established cult ever formed around her. So who was Tethys? Did every ancient writer agree on where she came from? What little do the myths actually tell us about her? And why does a goddess with so thin a story still leave marks in art and in language?
Hesiod's Theogony places Tethys among the children of Uranus, the Sky, and Gaia, the Earth. He lists eleven Titan siblings for her: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Cronus.
Her husband came from inside that circle. Tethys married her brother Oceanus, who was no ordinary god but an enormous river encircling the world. Their sons became the river gods, and their daughters became the Oceanids.
Counting Tethys herself, Hesiod's list makes twelve Titans, a number that later writers would rearrange.
The river Achelous, a son of Tethys, was the largest river in Greece. He gave one of his daughters in marriage to Alcmaeon. He also lost a wrestling contest to Heracles, with the right to marry Deianira as the prize.
Alpheus, another river god, fell in love with the nymph Arethusa and chased her all the way to Syracuse. There Artemis transformed her into a spring.
Scamander took the Trojan side in the Trojan War. When Achilles filled his waters with a great many Trojan corpses, the offended river overflowed its banks and nearly drowned the hero.
Among the daughters, Metis became the first wife of Zeus. He made her pregnant with Athena and then swallowed her. Eurynome, the third wife of Zeus, bore the Charites.
Doris married Nereus and mothered the Nereids. Callirhoe married Chrysaor and bore Geryon. Clymene married the Titan Iapetus, and her sons were Atlas, Menoetius, Prometheus, and Epimetheus.
Styx, who is also the goddess of the river that carries her name, married Pallas. Their children were Zelus, Nike, Kratos, and Bia.
Perseis married Helios and bore Circe and Aeetes. Idyia then became the wife of Aeetes, and their daughter was Medea.
Twice in book 14 of the Iliad, in a passage called the Deception of Zeus, Hera speaks of "Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, and mother Tethys". Some readers hear in this an older tradition. In it, Oceanus and Tethys, rather than Uranus and Gaia, are the parents of the gods.
M. L. West reads the lines exactly that way, as a myth of "first parents of the whole race of gods." Timothy Gantz is more cautious. He notes that "mother" may only reflect Tethys raising Hera for a time, and that the Oceanus phrase may be a stock epithet for the countless rivers and springs descended from him.
A later passage of the Iliad complicates that caution. There Hypnos calls Oceanus "genesis for all", which Gantz finds hard to read as anything but Oceanus being father of the Titans.
Plato, in his Timaeus, offers a family tree that is probably Orphic and may be an attempt to reconcile Homer with Hesiod. Uranus and Gaia parent Oceanus and Tethys. Oceanus and Tethys then parent Cronus, Rhea, the other Titans, and Phorcys.
In his Cratylus, Plato quotes Orpheus saying that Oceanus and Tethys were "the first to marry". That may point to an Orphic poem in which this pair, not Sky and Earth, began everything.
The numbers support the idea. Plato treats Phorcys as a brother of Cronus and Rhea. The mythographer Apollodorus adds Dione, mother of Aphrodite by Zeus, as a thirteenth Titan. Together they suggest an Orphic tradition in which Hesiod's twelve Titans were all children of Oceanus and Tethys, with Phorcys and Dione standing in for the parents.
Epimenides told yet another version. In his account, Night and Aer produced Tartarus, who in turn produced two Titans, possibly Oceanus and Tethys. From those two came the world egg.
In the Iliad, Hera says that her mother Rhea handed her over to Tethys and Oceanus while Zeus was deposing Cronus. They "lovingly nursed and cherished me in their halls", she recalls. This is the only early story about Tethys.
Hera is lying when she tells it. She claims to be travelling to visit her foster parents, who are angry with each other and no longer lovers, in order to reconcile them.
A much later astral myth ties Tethys to the Great Bear, the constellation Ursa Major. Zeus turned his lover Callisto into a bear and set her among the stars. The tale explains why the constellation never sinks below the horizon. Out of concern for her foster child Hera, Tethys forbade Callisto from "touching Ocean's deep".
Claudian gave Tethys a nursing role of another kind. In his telling, she suckled her nephew Helios and her niece Selene, children of her siblings Hyperion and Theia. This was in their infancy, when their light was still weak.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Tethys turns Aesacus into a diving bird.
Ancient readers also mixed her up with Thetis, the sea-nymph who married Peleus and mothered Achilles. That confusion is not the last tangle in her identity, since some scholars trace her all the way to Babylonian myth.
M. L. West heard something older beneath Hera's story in the Iliad. He sees an allusion to a possible archaic myth in which Tethys was "the mother of the gods, long estranged from her husband."
That estrangement, he speculates, could stand for the separation of "the upper and lower waters... corresponding to that of heaven and earth." The same idea appears in Babylonian cosmology, in the story of Apsu and Tiamat, the male and female waters that were originally united.
Several authors have noticed the match between Oceanus and Tethys and that Babylonian pair. Some suggest her very name may derive from Tiamat's.
In West's view, by Hesiod's time the myth may have been almost forgotten. Tethys would then be remembered only as the name of Oceanus's wife.
The name Tethys, spelled ΘΕΘΥΣ, is written beside her on the Erskine dinos, a black-figure vessel painted by Sophilos in the early sixth century BC and now in the British Museum. The scene is the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Tethys walks with Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, just behind Oceanus at the end of a procession of invited gods.
She is conjectured to appear in a similar wedding scene on the François Vase in Florence. She probably also appeared in the Gigantomachy frieze of the second-century BC Pergamon Altar. Only fragments survive there: part of a chiton below Oceanus's left arm, and a hand gripping a large tree branch behind his head.
Before the Roman period, images of her are rare. Then, between the second and fourth centuries AD, she became a fairly common subject in mosaics. They decorated baths, pools, and triclinia, the formal dining rooms of the Greek East, especially in Antioch and its suburbs. Sometimes she appears with Oceanus and sometimes alone.
Three attributes identify her: wings sprouting from her forehead, a rudder or oar, and a ketos, a creature with a dragon's head and a snake's body.
The earliest mosaic identified as Tethys came from the House of the Calendar in Antioch. It decorated a triclinium overlooking a pool and dates to shortly after AD 115. Tethys reclines on the left and Oceanus on the right. She has long hair and a winged forehead, is nude to the waist, and has draped legs. A ketos twines around her raised right arm.
Other paired mosaics come from the House of Menander at Daphne and from the House of the Boat of Psyches, whose triclinium mosaic is now in the Baltimore Museum of Art.
A fourth-century AD mosaic from a pool, probably in a public bath at Antioch, shows her alone. It was once at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and is now installed at Morgan Hall of the Harvard Business School in Boston. Apart from the Sophilos dinos, it is the only image of her identified by inscription. She rises from the sea bare-shouldered, with long dark hair parted in the middle and a golden rudder resting against her right shoulder.
Towards the end of the mosaic period, her imagery seems to merge with that of Thalassa, the Greek personification of the sea. That fits a wider drift. Tethys began as the consort of Oceanus, but in Hellenistic and Roman poetry her name became a poetic word for the sea itself.
Her name outlived her image. A moon of Saturn and the prehistoric Tethys Ocean both carry it today.
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Common questions
Who was Tethys in Greek mythology?
Tethys was a Titan, a child of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth). She was the sister and wife of the Titan Oceanus and the mother of the river gods and the Oceanids.
Who were the children of Tethys and Oceanus?
Tethys and Oceanus had numerous sons, the river gods, and numerous daughters, the Oceanids. Hesiod counted three thousand of each, a number meaning too many to count. Their children included the river gods Achelous, Alpheus, and Scamander and the Oceanids Metis, Doris, and Styx.
Was Tethys the mother of all the gods?
Some readers think so. Passages in book 14 of the Iliad call Oceanus the source of the gods and Tethys their mother, and an Orphic tradition quoted by Plato calls the pair the first to marry. Timothy Gantz argues that Homer may only mean that Tethys was Hera's foster mother.
What is the main story about Tethys in Greek myth?
In the Iliad, Hera says that her mother Rhea gave her to Tethys and Oceanus for safekeeping while Zeus was deposing Cronus. They lovingly nursed and cherished her in their halls. Tethys had no other active role in Greek mythology and no established cults.
How is Tethys connected to the Babylonian goddess Tiamat?
M. L. West sees in the Iliad a possible archaic myth of Tethys as a mother of the gods estranged from her husband. He compares it to Apsu and Tiamat, the male and female waters of Babylonian cosmology. Several authors have noted the correspondence, and her name may derive from Tiamat's.
How was Tethys depicted in ancient art and mosaics?
Images of Tethys are rare before the Roman period. During the second to fourth centuries AD she became a frequent feature of mosaics in baths, pools, and triclinia in the Greek East, especially in Antioch and its suburbs. She is shown with wings sprouting from her forehead, a rudder or oar, and a ketos.
What is named after the Greek goddess Tethys?
A moon of the planet Saturn and the prehistoric Tethys Ocean are both named after her. In Hellenistic and Roman poetry her name was also used as a poetic word for the sea.
All sources
52 references cited across the entry
- 4Apollodorus adds Dione to this list, while Diodorus Siculus leaves out Theia.
- 28West 1997, p. 147.
- 29Gantz, p. 11.
- 34Gantz, p. 743.
- 44West 1966, p. 204; see also West 1983, pp. 120–121.
- 47For a discussion of Tethy's iconography see Jentel, pp. 1193–1195.
- 52For a discussion of this group of mosaics, see Jentel, 1194–1195, which lists 15 Roman period Tethys mosaics (Tethys I (S) 3–17), and Wages, pp. 119–128. Doro Levi identified the sea goddess in the An
- 53Jentel, p. 1195; Wages, p. 125.