This god is exhibited in the human form from the waist upwards, with blue eyes, a large mouth, and hair matted like wild parsley; his shoulders covered with a purple skin, variegated with small scales, his feet resembling the fore feet of a horse, and his lower parts 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 Cœlus 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. Oceănus 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 Oceănus 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. Oceănus was described with a bull's head, to represent the rage and bellowing of the ocean when agitated by storms. Oceănus 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 Oceănus, by Tethys. Apollodōrus gives him Terra for his mother. His education and authority were in the waters, and his residence, more particularly, the Ægean 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 Hesperĭdes, he went to the Nymphs inhabiting the grottoes of Eridănus, 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, so called from Oceănus, are ranked in the third class of water deities.