Oceanus (titan)

Oceanus was the primordial Titan god of the great, earth-encircling River Okeanos, font of all of the earth's fresh-water - rivers, wells, springs and rain-clouds. He was also the god who regulated the heavenly bodies which rose from and set into his waters. Oceanus' wife Tethys "the Nurse" was probably envisioned distributing his nourishing waters across the earth through subterranean acquifers. Their children were the Potamoi, gods of rivers, and the Okeanides (Oceanids), nymphs of springs and fountains. Unlike his Titan-brothers Oceanos did not participate in the castration of their father Uranus nor join the war against Zeus and the Olympian gods.

In the Hellenistic era, Oceanos was reimagined as the god of the then increasingly accessible Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and the old cosmological idea of a great, earth-encircling, fresh-water stream was discarded. In mosaic art he is therefore usually depicted as a sea-god or the sea itself personified, with crab-claw horns, and for attributes, a serpent, oar and school of fish. His wife Tethys, shown seated beside him, had wings on her brow, in her role as the mother of rain-clouds.