Phorcys

A safe harbour on Ithaca bears Phorcys’s name. In Homer’s Odyssey, he is called the Old Man of the Sea. His harbour, marked by an olive tree and a sacred grotto, receives Odysseus after his twenty-year absence. Phorcys is therefore linked with the sea, its shelters, and its dangers. Greek accounts describe him and his sister and consort, Ceto, as personifications of the hidden perils and terrors of the ocean.

Phorcys was born from the primeval deities Pontus, the Sea, and Gaia, the Earth. Other accounts give Poseidon, Nereus, Doris, or Gaea as parents. With Ceto, he fathered the Gorgons, the Graiae, Echidna, and Ladon, the dragon that guarded the golden apples of the Hesperides. Some sources also make him the father of Scylla, the Sirens, the Tritons, and Thoosa. His place in myth is chiefly through these beings and through the Ithacan harbour connected with Odysseus, rather than through a story in which he is the central figure.