Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Proteus.
The gallery
Menelaus wrestling Proteus (emblem from Achillis Bocchii Symbolicarum)
Giulio Bonasone, 1574
This emblem engraving by Giulio Bonasone, published in Achille Bocchi's Symbolicarum quaestionum (1574), shows Menelaus grappling with the Old Man of the Sea as Proteus shifts shape — the central image of Odyssey 4, when the king of Sparta, guided by Eidothea, seizes her father among the seals at Pharos and compels him to speak without deceit. The print gave Renaissance readers a visual summary of the prophecy that Odysseus still lived on Calypso's isle and that suitors plotted against Telemachus.
The sea-god Proteus leaning on a water jar
Philips Galle, 1586
In Philips Galle's engraving from the series of river- and sea-gods — here in the collection of the North Holland Archives — Proteus (spelled Protheus in the Dutch inscription) leans on an amphora from which fish pour, with a harbour city behind him. The image belongs to the same marine pantheon Galle circulated alongside Nereus and other Old Men of the Sea, fixing Proteus as a bearded prophetic divinity of Egypt's coast and the changing depths.
Proteus (from the series of Sea and River Gods)
Philips Galle, c. 1586
A plate from Galle's Semideorum Marinorum amnicorumque sigillariae imagines, preserved in the Rijksmuseum print collection, presents Proteus as a standing sea-god identified by inscription. Such printed pantheons kept Homer’s shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea current in Netherlandish emblem-books and decorator’s handbooks long after antiquity, separate from the narrative of Menelaus but part of the same visual vocabulary of marine prophecy.
Proteus (Emblematum Liber)
Andrea Alciato (emblem); unknown woodcut artist, 1531
Andrea Alciato's Emblematum Liber (1531) made Proteus an emblem of mutable nature — the god who assumes many forms rather than reveal his counsel freely. The woodcut became one of the most influential Renaissance images of the name, from which the English adjective "protean" ultimately derives, and it circulated independently of Homer's Egyptian episode while reinforcing the myth's core idea of elusive transformation.
In music & on stage
In play
Protean
English protean means endlessly changeable — the Old Man of the Sea's shape-shifting as the everyday word for versatile identity.
Ulysses
James Joyce
Joyce's Proteus episode sends Stephen Dedalus along Sandymount Strand — thought itself shifting form like the Homeric seal-herd prophet.
Proteus
Proteus remains the prophet who must be held through every form — seal, water, fire — until he speaks the truth.