Fair-cheeked sea-goddess of the monstrous deep, daughter of Pontus (Sea) and Gaia (Earth) and sister-wife of Phorcys, with whom she mothered the Gorgons and the grey Graeae.1
Hesiod sets Ceto among the firstborn brood of the deep: Pontus, the barren Sea, mated with Earth and got great Thaumas and proud Phorcys, and fair-cheeked Ceto, and Eurybia who has a heart of flint within her — alongside their eldest, the truthful Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea. So Ceto stands at the very roots of the waters, sister to the sea's elder powers before she is wedded to one of them. Apollodorus gives the same lineage in plain catalogue: to Sea and Earth were born Phorcus, Thaumas, Nereus, Eurybia, and Ceto.2
Joined in love to her brother Phorcys, Ceto became the mother of monsters. Hesiod says she bore him first the fair-cheeked Graiae, sisters grey from their birth — Pemphredo well-clad and saffron-robed Enyo — and then the Gorgons who dwell beyond glorious Ocean toward Night: Stheno and Euryale, and Medusa who alone of the three was mortal and doomed. When Perseus struck off Medusa's head, there sprang from her severed neck great Chrysaor and the horse Pegasus, conceived of her by Poseidon, the Dark-haired One — so that from Ceto's mortal daughter came new wonders even in death.3
Apollodorus reckons Ceto's grey daughters as three rather than two. He names the Phorcides — Enyo, Pephredo, and Dino — old women from their birth, who shared a single eye and a single tooth among them, and calls them sisters of the Gorgons; it was from these that Perseus, having seized the eye and the tooth, won his way to Medusa. The same author parts from Hesiod on Ceto's serpent: he makes the hundred-headed dragon that guards the golden apples the offspring of Typhon and Echidna, so that the apple-warden's descent from Ceto is the Hesiodic reckoning alone.4
Hyginus likewise lists from Phorcys and Ceto the Phorcides Pemphredo, Enyo, and Persis — for which last, he notes, others say Dino — and counts among the same brood the Gorgons Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa.5
Hesiod gives Ceto one child more, and youngest of all. Joined again in love to Phorcys, she bore the awful snake that guards the apples all of gold in the secret places of the dark earth at its great bounds — the dragon later named Ladon — and the poet closes the line: this is the offspring of Ceto and Phorcys.6
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
