Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Phorcys.
The gallery
Mosaic of Marine Deities (Phorcys, Ceto, and Triton or Thaumas)
Unknown (Roman mosaicist), Late Roman period (c. 2nd–4th century AD)
This late Roman floor mosaic, recovered from the Trajan Baths at Acholla in present-day Tunisia and now in the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, ranks among the very few surviving images to name the old sea-god Phorcys directly. He appears at the center as a fish-tailed marine power, flanked by his sister-wife Ceto on the right and a third aquatic deity on the left, identified as either Triton or his brother Thaumas. The composition embodies the Greco-Roman vision of Phorcys as a primeval lord of the deep — Homer's 'old man of the sea' and, with Ceto, progenitor of the Gorgons and Graeae. It is the principal illustration of Phorcys's own Wikipedia article and the clearest visual attestation of the rarely-depicted sea-god.
Phorcys with Torch and Basket (marine procession from Acholla)
Unknown (Roman mosaicist), Late Roman period (c. 2nd–4th century AD)
A second Acholla panel in the Bardo National Museum shows Phorcys in his characteristic late-Roman guise: red-skinned merman with lobster horns and clawed forelimbs, raising a flaming torch and a shallow basket while a sea-goddess rides the coiling cetus beside him. Distinct from the three-deity group on the same bath floor, this torch-bearing composition is the iconographic type handbooks cite for Phorcys as lord of hidden sea dangers — father, with Ceto, of the Gorgons and Graeae.
Marine Cortège of Acholla (Phorcys torch group, bordered view)
Unknown (Roman mosaicist), Late Roman period (c. 2nd–4th century AD)
A museum photograph of the Acholla marine cortège sets Phorcys's torch-and-basket group inside its lotus-and-palmette border, clarifying the scale of the Trajan Baths procession in which the rarely carved sea-god appears. The bordered view complements the closer Tunis plate of the same panel and the separate three-deity mosaic from the complex, keeping Phorcys's scarce ancient imagery tied to one Tunisian find.