Tethys was one of the Titan offspring of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth).
Hesiod lists her Titan siblings as
Oceanus,
Coeus,
Crius,
Hyperion,
Iapetus,
Theia,
Rhea,
Themis,
Mnemosyne,
Phoebe, and
Cronus. Tethys married her brother Oceanus, an enormous river encircling the world, and was by him the mother of numerous sons (the
river gods) and numerous daughters (the
Oceanids). According to Hesiod, there were three thousand (i.e. innumerable) river gods. These included
Achelous, the god of the
Achelous River, the largest river in Greece, who gave his daughter in marriage to
Alcmaeon and was defeated by
Heracles in a wrestling contest for the right to marry
Deianira;
Alpheus, who fell in love with the
nymph Arethusa and pursued her to
Syracuse, where she was transformed into a spring by
Artemis; and
Scamander who fought on the side of the
Trojans during the
Trojan War and, offended when
Achilles polluted his waters with a large number of Trojan corpses, overflowed his banks nearly drowning Achilles. According to Hesiod, there were also three thousand Oceanids. These included
Metis,
Zeus's first wife, whom Zeus impregnated with
Athena and then swallowed;
Eurynome, Zeus's third wife, and mother of the
Charites;
Doris, the wife of
Nereus and mother of the
Nereids;
Callirhoe, the wife of
Chrysaor and mother of
Geryon;
Clymene, the wife of Iapetus, and mother of
Atlas,
Menoetius,
Prometheus, and
Epimetheus;
Perseis, wife of
Helios and mother of
Circe and
Aeetes;
Idyia, wife of Aeetes and mother of
Medea; and
Styx, goddess of the river Styx, and the wife of
Pallas and mother of
Zelus,
Nike,
Kratos, and
Bia.
Primeval mother Passages in book 14 of the
Iliad, called the
Deception of Zeus, suggest the possibility that
Homer knew a tradition in which Oceanus and Tethys (rather than Uranus and Gaia, as in Hesiod) were the primeval parents of the gods. Twice Homer has
Hera describe the pair as "Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, and mother Tethys". According to
M. L. West, these lines suggests a myth in which Oceanus and Tethys are the "first parents of the whole race of gods." However, as
Timothy Gantz points out, "mother" could simply refer to the fact that Tethys was Hera's foster mother for a time, as Hera tells us in the lines immediately following, while the reference to Oceanus as the genesis of the gods "might be simply a formulaic epithet indicating the numberless rivers and springs descended from Okeanos" (compare with
Iliad 21.195–197). But, in a later
Iliad passage,
Hypnos also describes Oceanus as "
genesis for all", which, according to Gantz, is hard to understand as meaning other than that, for Homer, Oceanus was the father of the Titans.
Plato, in his
Timaeus, provides a genealogy (probably
Orphic) which perhaps reflected an attempt to reconcile this apparent divergence between Homer and Hesiod, in which Uranus and Gaia are the parents of Oceanus and Tethys, and Oceanus and Tethys are the parents of Cronus and Rhea and the other Titans, as well as
Phorcys. In his
Cratylus, Plato quotes Orpheus as saying that Oceanus and Tethys were "the first to marry", possibly also reflecting an Orphic theogony in which Oceanus and Tethys—rather than Uranus and Gaia—were the primeval parents. Plato's apparent inclusion of Phorcys as a Titan (being the brother of Cronus and Rhea), and the mythographer
Apollodorus's inclusion of
Dione, the mother of
Aphrodite by Zeus, as a thirteenth Titan, suggests an Orphic tradition in which Hesiod's twelve Titans were the offspring of Oceanus and Tethys, with Phorcys and Dione taking the place of Oceanus and Tethys. According to
Epimenides, the first two beings,
Night and Aer, produced
Tartarus, who in turn produced two Titans (possibly Oceanus and Tethys) from whom came the
world egg. ==Mythology==