Tethys- Greek TitanTitan"Mother of Rivers"

The Great Nurse

Hesiod counts Tethys among the twelve Titans born to Gaia and Ouranos. With Oceanus she bore three thousand sons — the Potamoi, every river god from the Nile to the Scamander — and three thousand daughters, the Oceanid nymphs, who tended the world's springs, streams, and rain-fed clouds. Hesiod names the eldest: Styx, whose waters bound the gods' oaths, and Doris, mother of the Nereids, among dozens more. Homer goes further: in the Iliad, Hera calls Oceanus the origin of the gods and Tethys their mother. While Oceanus circled the earth's rim as one great river, Tethys fed the inland waters. Every spring that rose from the ground carried her name's meaning: nurse.

Foster Mother of Hera

When Rhea hid her children from devouring Kronos, she entrusted the young Hera to Tethys and Oceanus at the world's edge. They raised the future queen of the gods in their watery realm until Zeus overthrew his father. Hera never forgot the debt. In the Iliad, when she schemes to distract Zeus from the battlefield at Troy, she tells Athena she is going to visit Tethys and Oceanus — her dear foster parents — to reconcile a quarrel between them. The quarrel may be real or invented; either way, a visit to her foster parents needed no explanation.

Neither Tethys nor Oceanus fought in the Titanomachy. They stayed at the world's edge tending the waters, and for that neutrality they were never cast into Tartarus with the defeated Titans.

The Circumpolar Stars

When Callisto was turned into a bear and placed among the stars as Ursa Major, Hera went to Tethys and asked her to bar the constellation from her waters — to forbid it from ever setting below the horizon. Tethys agreed. And so the Great Bear circles the pole without rest, never dipping into the ocean stream that refreshes the other stars each night.