Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss Oceanus, the very first Titan and, if allusion and shallow references are anything to go off of, perhaps, generally speaking, the very first god - including Primordials, Titans, and Olympians - in all of Greek mythology. This, in a broader sense, is indicative how complex Greek mythology was, there having been, the accounts that remain popular today notwithstanding, different versions of the creation myth, something evidenced by a multitude of allusions to Oceanus as a creator across an array of works, and by offshoots of what could be called 'orthodox Greek mythology', such as orphism, a religious movement that centered on the hero Orpheus, who was thought of as the seed from which Orphism grew, him having brought back secret knowledge when he returned from the underworld to the land of the living.

Oceanus was the personification of the great river that encircled the world, and in the context of his family (the other 11 first-generation Titans), he was somewhat of an aberration, partial to pacifism as he was.

He eschewed conflict, neither joining in the castration of his father nor fighting in the Titanomachy, the 10 year war between the Olympians and the Titans. I was going to say, "though he was undoubtedly one of the most powerful gods in Greek mythology, he seldom surfaces in any of its myths, more often existing as a piece of the stage on which Greek mythology unfolds than as an actor in the production", but after delving into his mythology more deeply, he actually does a have a nice little niche. He's mentioned a handful of times by Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey. In Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound", he visits Prometheus, now chained to a rock by Zeus, and offers the condemned god succor. One of the Orphic Hymns is dedicated to him, and generally, he is either mentioned or makes brief appearances in a number of other works. As well, the Iliad features several allusions to Oceanus, not Chaos, being the first god and thus the ultimate source of creation in Greek mythology.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.