The River at the Edge of the World

Oceanus is not the sea the Greeks sailed, that is Pontos and the domain of Poseidon, but the vast fresh-water river imagined to encircle the flat disc of the earth, from which all other waters flow and to which the sun, moon and stars return. In the Iliad he is called the origin of all the gods, a line that some ancient and modern readers have connected with Near Eastern cosmogonies in which the world begins from primordial waters. With his sister Tethys he fathers the countless rivers (Potamoi) and the Oceanid nymphs of springs and streams.

Alone among the Titans he took no part in the mutilation of Uranus and stayed neutral in the war against the Olympians, and so escaped Tartarus, remaining at the world's rim, an old, benign cosmological power rather than a defeated enemy. The word ocean descends directly from his name. Oceanus remained a popular subject in Roman domestic art long after his cult, if it ever had one, had faded: the House of Oceanus at Zeugma in modern Turkey preserves a large second or third century CE floor mosaic showing Oceanus and his sister-wife Tethys amid fish, dolphin-riding erotes and the sea-monster Cetos, one of many such Roman mosaics that used the ancient Titan of the world-river as a decorative emblem of abundance and hospitality in the private houses of the wealthy, far removed from his role in Hesiod's cosmogony.