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Greek mythology Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of ancient Greek folklore, today absorbed alongside Roman mythology into the broader designation of classical mythology. These stories conc ...

, Pontus (; ) was an ancient, pre-Olympian sea-god, one of the

Greek primordial deities In Greek mythology, the primordial deities are the first generation of Deity, gods and goddesses. These deities represented the fundamental forces and physical foundations of the world and were generally not actively worshipped, as they, for the ...

. Pontus was

Gaia In Greek mythology, Gaia (; , a poetic form of ('), meaning 'land' or 'earth'),, , . also spelled Gaea (), is the personification of Earth. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthenogenic—of all life. She is the mother of Uranus (S ...

's son and has no father; according to the Greek poet

Hesiod Hesiod ( or ; ''Hēsíodos''; ) was an ancient Greece, Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer.M. L. West, ''Hesiod: Theogony'', Oxford University Press (1966), p. 40.Jasper Gr ...

, he was born without coupling, though according to Hyginus, Pontus is the son of Aether and Gaia. Hyginus, ''Fabulae'
Preface
/ref>

Mythology

For Hesiod, Pontus seems little more than a personification of the sea, ''ho póntos'' (), by which Hellenes signified the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Eur ...

. After the castration of his brother,

Uranus Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It is a gaseous cyan-coloured ice giant. Most of the planet is made of water, ammonia, and methane in a Supercritical fluid, supercritical phase of matter, which astronomy calls "ice" or Volatile ( ...

, Pontus, with his mother Gaia, fathered

Nereus In Greek mythology, Nereus ( ; ) was the eldest son of Pontus (the Sea) and Gaia ( the Earth), with Pontus himself being a son of Gaia. Nereus and Doris became the parents of 50 daughters (the Nereids) and a son ( Nerites), with whom Nereus ...

(the Old Man of the Sea), Thaumas (the awe-striking "wonder" of the Sea, embodiment of the sea's dangerous aspects), Phorcys and his sister-consort

Ceto Ceto (; ) is a primordial sea goddess in Greek mythology, the daughter of Pontus and his mother, Gaia. As a mythological figure, she is considered to be one of the most ancient deities, and bore a host of monstrous children fathered by Pho ...

, and the "Strong Goddess" Eurybia.

, ''

Theogony The ''Theogony'' () is a poem by Hesiod (8th–7th century BC) describing the origins and genealogy, genealogies of the Greek gods, composed . It is written in the Homeric Greek, epic dialect of Ancient Greek and contains 1,022 lines. It is one ...

'
233–239
Gantz, p. 16; Grimal, s.v. Pontus. For a genealogical table of the descendants of Gaia and Pontus, see Gantz, p. 805. With the sea goddess Thalassa (whose own name simply means "sea" but is derived from a

Pre-Greek The pre-Greek substrate (or substratum) consists of the unknown pre-Greek language or languages (either Pre-Indo-European or other Indo-European languages) spoken in prehistoric Greece prior to the emergence of the Proto-Greek language in the r ...

root), he fathered all sea life. In a Roman sculpture of the 2nd century AD, Pontus, rising from seaweed, grasps a rudder with his right hand and leans on the prow of a ship. He wears a mural crown, and accompanies

Fortuna Fortuna (, equivalent to the Greek mythology, Greek goddess Tyche) is the goddess of fortune and the personification of luck in Religion in ancient Rome, Roman religion who, largely thanks to the Late Antique author Boethius, remained popular thr ...

, whose draperies appear at the left, as twin patron deities of the

Black Sea The Black Sea is a marginal sea, marginal Mediterranean sea (oceanography), mediterranean sea lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bound ...

port of Tomis in

Moesia Moesia (; Latin: ''Moesia''; ) was an ancient region and later Roman province situated in the Balkans south of the Danube River. As a Roman domain Moesia was administered at first by the governor of Noricum as 'Civitates of Moesia and Triballi ...

Sources

Hesiod

Hyginus

Notes

References

* Gantz, Timothy, ''Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources'', Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, Two volumes: (Vol. 1), (Vol. 2). * Grimal, Pierre, ''The Dictionary of Classical Mythology'', Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. . * Gaius Julius Hyginus, ''Fabulae from The Myths of Hyginus'' translated and edited by Mary Grant. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies
Online version at the Topos Text Project.
*