Which Titan was the god of the ocean that encircled the world? Oceanus was the Titan associated with the great river that ancient Greeks imagined encircling the world.
Oceanus was one of the children of Uranus, the Sky, and Gaia, the Earth. He married his sister Tethys, and together they were said to parent the river gods and the Oceanids. Hesiod traditionally describes thousands of each, making Oceanus a source of the world’s waterways as well as a divine being.
The ancient Greek Oceanus was not exactly the modern ocean. Early cosmology pictured it as a vast, sometimes freshwater river flowing around the inhabited earth. Homeric tradition connected it with the daily movement of the Sun: Helios rose from Oceanus in the east and returned to it in the west.
Oceanus is easily confused with Poseidon, the Olympian god of the sea, or Pontus, the primordial personification of the sea. Nereus was another older sea deity, known as the “Old Man of the Sea.” Oceanus also differs from the modern word “ocean,” which developed from his Greek name.