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Myths about the Roman God Oceanus

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Myths about the Roman God Oceanus
The Oceanus, oldest son of Coelus and Terra, or Vesta. He married Tethys, and besides her had many other wives. He had several sisters, all Nymphs, each of whom possessed an hundred woods and as many rivers. Oceanus was esteemed by the ancients as the father both of gods and men, who were said to have taken their beginning from him, on account of the ocean's encompassing the earth with its waves, and because he was the principal of that radical moisture diffused through universal matter, without which, according to Thales, nothing could either be produced or subsist.

Homer makes Juno visit Oceanus at the remotest limits of the earth, and acknowledge him and Tethys as the parents of the gods, adding, that she herself had been brought up under their tuition. Many of his children are mentioned in poetical story, whose names it would be endless to enumerate, and, indeed, they are only the appellations of the principal rivers of the world. Oceanus was described with a bull's head, to represent the rage and bellowing of the ocean when agitated by storms. Oceanus and Tethys are ranked in the highest classes of sea-deities, and as governors in chief over the whole world of waters.

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