Phorcys- Greek GodDeity"Old Man of the Sea"

The Old Man of the Sea

Phorcys is a primordial sea god born of the union of Pontus and Gaia, as told in Hesiod's Theogony. He was brother to Nereus, Thaumas, Eurybia, and Ceto — together these children of Sea and Earth represented the varied powers of the ocean. Where Nereus was the calm, truthful sea, Phorcys was its depths and what dwelt within them. Homer calls him "the old man of the sea" when naming the harbor sacred to him on Ithaca. In art, he appears with crab-claw foreparts, marking him as a being wholly of the abyss.

Father of Monsters

With his sister-wife Ceto, Phorcys fathered a terrible brood. Hesiod catalogs the offspring in detail: the three Gorgons — Stheno, Euryale, and the mortal Medusa, whose gaze turned men to stone — and the three Graeae, grey-haired from birth and sharing a single eye and tooth among them. To this pair also belonged Echidna, the half-woman half-serpent who would herself become mother of the Hydra and the Chimera; and the great serpent Ladon, who coiled sleeplessly around the tree of golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides. Some traditions, including Apollodorus, also attribute Scylla to Phorcys — the six-headed monster who plucked sailors from passing ships in the narrow strait.

The Harbor of Phorcys

In the Odyssey, the harbor where the Phaeacians deposit the sleeping Odysseus on Ithaca is called the Harbor of Phorcys — a sheltered inlet with an olive tree at its head and a cave sacred to the Naiads nearby. Homer describes it as a place where ships can lie without mooring lines, so calm are its waters. It was here that Odysseus first touched Ithacan soil, delivered asleep by the Phaeacians after ten years of wandering.