Shownotes Transcript
Hey everyone, Welcome to Mythology Explained. In today's video, we're going to discuss the five most powerful male Titans in Greek mythology. We'll make a separate video for female Titans later on. Let us know in the comments if you agree with our selection. Let's get into it.Beginning our list is OceanusOceanus was the eldest of the 12 first-generation Titans. He personified the river Oceanus, which was the great river that encircled the world. In this way, more so than his 11 siblings, he was similar to his parents, both of them primordial deities, for Uranus personified the sky and Gaia, the earth. Tethys, his sister and another of the 12 first-generation Titans, was his consort, and by her he sired the Oceanids, a group of 3,000 water nymphs. Also born to them were all the rivers of the world, which, with the exception of the river Styx, were exclusively male. As well, it was thought that Oceanus was the source from which all the rivers of the world fed and flowed. In appearance, Oceanus is depicted as bearded and mature, with more fantastical versions including horns and a fish tail. Because the earth was thought to be flat back in the time antiquity, Oceanus, by nature of him being the great river that encircled the earth, was thought of as the outer-boundary of the mortal world, thereby becoming a dividing line that separated opposites: known and unknown, what is prosaic and familiar from what is exoctic and mysterious, like civilization and chartered territory from remote tribes and monsters, even the realms of life and death. The Hesperides, the nymphs who guarded the golden apples gifted to Hera by Gaia, the Gorgons, the Hecatonchires, the hundred-armed giants who helped the gods defeat the Titans, Geryon, a triple-bodied giant killed by Hercules, and the Ethiopians, all of these nymphs, monsters, and people were thought to dwell near the waters of Oceanus - their proximity to him symbolizing the divide he embodied between the realm of mortality and the realm of magic, monsters, and divinity.