The Mother of the Waters

Tethys is a first-generation Titaness, daughter of Uranos and Gaia, and the goddess of the nourishing fresh waters that feed the world. With her brother and husband Oceanus, the encircling river that the early Greeks imagined running round the edge of the earth, she is the mother of an enormous progeny: the three thousand river-gods and the three thousand Oceanid nymphs, the springs and streams and the flowing waters generally.

Homer gives her a memorable role in the Iliad, where Hera recalls being raised in the house of Oceanus and Tethys, so that the couple appear almost as foster-grandparents of the divine order and, in one line, as the origin of the gods themselves. Tethys has no cult of her own and scarcely any narrative; she is the great watery ancestress of the Theogony, the personified source of the rivers on which human life depends. She should not be confused with Thetis, the sea-nymph mother of Achilles, a quite different figure whose similar name has caused confusion since antiquity.