Oceanus

Oceanus, at right, with scaly tail, in the Gigantomachy of the Pergamon Altar.

Ocean (Ὠκεανός) 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).^[1] 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.^[2] 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."^[3]

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:

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.^[4] 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

Statue of god Oceanus, Rome.

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.[1]

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.

Okeanos Potamos as the lower Danube from ancient literary perspectives

Part of the Danubius or Istros river was also known as (together with the Black Sea) the Okeanos in ancient times, the lower Danube being called the Okeanos Potamos (Okeanos River). The lower Danube was also called the Keras Okeanoio (Gulf or Horn of Okeanos) in the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes (Argon. IV. 282). Okeanos was not originally a Greek word (Thalassa being Greek for sea), Okeanos being a Pelasgian word which was similar to eye (ochio) and water (aqua) with the Pelasgian ending an-os, which could have meant large still water (not a sea). The lower Danube has a slow deep wide course, so it can be seen why it was considered as part of the Okeanos.

Strabo mentions that the Okeanos was once an immense lake (Geogr. I. 3. 4), and that the Argonauts sailed to the land rich in gold (Colchis, on the Black Sea) that was considered as another Okeanos (Geogr. I. 2. 10). Sedimentary evidence suggests that the Black Sea was once a freshwater lake.

It is possible that the ancient Greek name Axenos (as in Pontos Axenos, before it was renamed Pontos Euxenos) is related to Okeanos (not inhospitability, if anything the Atlantic would have been more difficult to navigate). 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) in their theogonic legends exclusively refer to the lower Danube as the Okeanos Potamos, possibly due to it being remembered as the remnant of when the Pannonian and lower Danubian basins were under water. This may well reconcile why the dwellings of the Hyperboreans were near the Okeanos according to Hecateus of Abdera, while according to Pindar they were near the Istros or lower Danube (Olymp. III. 17).

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.^[5]

See also

• List of Children of Oceanus
• Rasā
• USS Oceanus (ARB-2)
• Oceanus Hopkins

References

Sources

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

External links

• Livio Catullo Stecchini, "Ancient Cosmology"
• Theoi Project - Okeanos
• Hellenic Navy's Submarine OCEANOS (S-118) 3D Animation
• Oceanus is a non-profit organization.