arts
terminating in a double forked tail: sometimes he is seen in a car, with
horses of a bright cerulean. His trumpet is a large conch, or sea-shell.
There were several Tritons, but one chief over all, the distinguished
messenger of Neptune, as Mercury was of Jupiter, and Iris of Juno.

OCEANUS, oldest son of Coelus and Terra, or Vesta. He married Tethys,
and besides her had many other wives. He had several sisters, all
Nymphs, each of whom possessed an hundred woods and as many rivers.
Oceanus was esteemed by the ancients as the father both of gods and men,
who were said to have taken their beginning from him, on account of the
ocean's encompassing the earth with its waves, and because he was the
principal of that radical moisture diffused through universal matter,
without which, according to Thales, nothing could either be produced or
subsist.

Homer makes Juno visit Oceanus at the remotest limits of the earth, and
acknowledge him and Tethys as the parents of the gods, adding, that she
herself had been brought up under their tuition. Many of his children
are mentioned in poetical story, whose names it would be endless to
enumerate, and, indeed, they are only the appellations of the principal
rivers of the world. Oceanus was described with a bull's head, to
represent the rage and bellowing of the ocean when agitated by storms.
Oceanus and Tethys are ranked in the highest classes of sea-deities, and
as governors in chief over the whole world of waters.

NEREUS, a sea-deity, was son of Oceanus, by Tethys. Apollodorus gives
him Terra for his mother. His education and authority were in the
waters, and his residence, more particularly, the AEgean seas. He had the
faculty of assuming what form he pleased. He was regarded as a prophet;
and foretold to Paris the war which the rape of Helen would bring upon
his country. When Hercules was ordered to fetch the golden apples of the
Hesperides, he went to the Nymphs inhabiting the grottoes of Eridanus,
to know where he might find them; the Nymphs sent him to Nereus, who, to
elude the inquiry, perpetually varied his form, till Hercules having
seized him, resolved to hold him till he resumed his original shape, on
which he yielded the desired information. Nereus had, by his sister
Doris, fifty daughters called Nereids. Hesiod highly celebrates him as a
mild and peaceful old man, a lover of justice and moderation. Nereus and
Doris, with their descendants the Nereids, or Oceaniads,