Tethys was sister and wife of Oceanus, mother by him of the three thousand Oceanids and the three thousand river-gods. She was the personification of the freshwater that nourished the world, and her name became, in late antiquity, a poetic synonym for the sea generally (a doubling that has confused some modern readers, since the same name was given by astronomers in 1872 to the great prehistoric ocean from whose deposits the Mediterranean and the Alps were formed). She had no extended myth of her own, though Homer notes that she helped raise the goddess Hera, who was given to her care during the Titanomachy when Rhea fled with the infant Zeus.
Before thisOceanus
Next on the wallHyperion
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Hesiod, Theogony 136, 337; Homer, Iliad 14.200–202 (Hera's debt to Tethys for nursing her). The geological Tethys Ocean was named after her by Eduard Suess in 1893 and is the ancestor of the modern Mediterranean.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
- Consort ofOceanus
Tethys was sister and wife of Oceanus
- Sibling ofOceanus
Tethys was sister and wife of Oceanus
Companion ofHeraHomer notes that she helped raise the goddess Hera, who was given to her care during the Titanomachy
Parent ofMetisan Oceanid, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, and the first wife of Zeus
Parent ofStyxStyx was a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, the eldest of the three thousand Oceanids
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for The Titans and Their Children. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline
- c. 1600–1100 BCE
- Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
- c. 1100–800 BCE
- Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
- late 8th–7th centuries BCE
- The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
- 7th–6th centuries BCE
- Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
- 6th–5th centuries BCE
- Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
- 5th century BCE
- Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
- 4th century BCE
- Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
- 323–31 BCE
- Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.