Taking a Dip with Thetis by David Hart

Silver-footed Thetis (ancient Greek Θέτις), disposer or "placer" (the one who places), is encountered in Greek mythology mostly as a sea nymph, one of the fifty Nereids, daughters of the ancient one of the seas with shape-shifting abilities who survives in the historical vestiges of most later Greek myths as Proteus (whose name suggests the "first", the "primordial" or the "firstborn").

When described as a Nereid in Classical myths, Thetis was the daughter of Nereus and Doris (Hesiod, Theogony), and a granddaughter of Tethys with whom she sometimes shares characteristics. Often she seems to lead the Nereids as they attend to her tasks. Sometimes she also is identified with Metis.

It is likely, however, that she was one of the earliest of deities worshiped in Archaic Greece, the oral traditions and records of which are lost. Only one written record, a fragment, exists attesting to her worship and an early Alcman hymn exists that identifies Thetis as the creator of the universe. Worship of Thetis as the goddess is documented to have persisted in some regions by historical writers such as Pausanias.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Taking
• Dip
• Thetis
• David
• Hart
• hartistry
• hartilicious
• piano
• original
• sonata
• ballad
• symphonic music
• waltz

[paparotzie]

@paparotzie According to classical mythology, the wedding of Thetis and Peleus was celebrated on Mount Pelion outside the cave of Chiron and attended by the deities: there they celebrated the marriage with feasting. Apollo played the lyre and the Muses sang, Pindar claimed. At the wedding Chiron gave Peleus an ashen spear that had been polished by Athene and had a blade forged by Hephaestus, and Poseidon gave him the immortal horses, Balius and Xanthus.

[paparotzie]

@paparotzie Quintus of Smyrna, recalling this passage, does write that Thetis once released Zeus from chains;[3] but there is no other reference to this rebellion among the Olympians, and some readers, such as M. M. Willcock,[4] have understood the episode as an ad hoc invention of Homer's to support Achilles' request that his mother intervene with Zeus.

[paparotzie]

@paparotzie "You alone of all the gods saved Zeus the Darkener of the Skies from an inglorious fate, when some of the other Olympians—Hera, Poseidon, and Pallas Athene—had plotted to throw him into chains... You, goddess, went and saved him from that indignity. You quickly summoned to high Olympus the monster of the hundred arms whom the gods call Briareus, but mankind Aegaeon, [2] a giant more powerful even than his father.

[paparotzie]

@paparotzie The pre-modern etymology of her name, from tithemi (τίθημι), "to set up, establish," suggests the perception among Classical Greeks of an early political role. Walter Burkert [1] considers her name a transformed doublet of Tethys.

In Iliad I, Achilles recalls to his mother her role in defending, and thus legitimizing, the reign of Zeus against an incipient rebellion by three Olympians, each of whom has pre-Olympian roots:

[paparotzie]

While most extant material about Thetis concerns her role as mother of Achilles and, as such, she is largely a creature of poetic fancy rather than cult worship in the historical period, there is one notable exception (see Thetis in Laconia below); a few fragmentary hints and references suggest an older layer of the tradition, in which the sea-goddess Thetis played a far more central role in the religious beliefs, practices, and imagination of some of the archaic Greeks