A Nereid, daughter of the truthful sea-elder Nereus and Ocean's daughter Doris, Thetis is the silver-footed goddess wedded against her will to the mortal Peleus and made mother of Achilles. Her story is the grief of a divine mother who knows her son's doom and cannot avert it.1
Thetis belongs to the great sisterhood of the sea. Hesiod numbers her among the lovely daughters borne to Nereus, the Old Man who is true and lies not, by rich-haired Doris, daughter of Ocean; Apollodorus likewise lists Thetis among the Nereids born of Nereus and Doris. In Homer she is the daughter of the old man of the sea who dwells in the deep, and her sisters throng about her when she grieves. All three know her as the wife of Peleus and the mother of Achilles.2
She is a shelter to gods in flight. When man-slaying Lycurgus drove the nurses of Dionysus down the slopes, the god plunged beneath the wave of the sea, and Thetis received him in her bosom, terror-stricken; Apollodorus tells the same, that Dionysus took refuge in the sea with Thetis, daughter of Nereus, while Lycurgus paid for the outrage with madness.3
Homer gives her older kindness and her keenest grief alike. She had once saved Hephaestus: cast headlong from heaven by his shameless mother, he was caught by Thetis and Eurynome and kept nine years in their hollow cave, where he forged his first cunning work — a debt the smith-god remembers when she comes to him. In the Iliad she is the mourning mother who bends Olympus to her son. When Agamemnon dishonored Achilles, Thetis rose from the wave, clasped Zeus by the knees and chin, and won his nod that the Achaeans should be driven back until her son was honored. She tells Achilles the truth he carries like a fate: twofold dooms bear him toward death — to fall at Troy with imperishable renown, or to go home to long life and no glory. And when Patroclus is slain she comes weeping from the sea and goes to Hephaestus, who for her sake forges the great shield. Hers is foreknowledge without escape.4
A prophecy turned the gods' desire for her into a mortal marriage. Apollodorus reports that Zeus and Poseidon, rivals for her hand, withdrew when Themis foretold that the son born of Thetis would be mightier than his father; he adds that others said Prometheus gave the warning, and others again that Thetis, reared by Hera, refused Zeus and was married off to a mortal in his anger. Hyginus tells it through Prometheus alone, who, knowing the prediction, bartered the secret for his own freedom and warned Jove off, lest a son greater than himself drive him from his kingdom as he had driven out Saturn. So Thetis was given in marriage to Peleus.5
Apollodorus tells how Peleus won her against her will. By Chiron's counsel he seized her on Pelion and held her fast though she turned now into fire, now into water, now into a beast, until she resumed her own shape; and there on the mountain the gods celebrated the wedding with feast and song.6
From that union came Achilles, and Thetis would not let her child stay wholly mortal. Apollodorus tells how she hid the babe in the fire by night to destroy the mortal element Peleus had given him, anointing him with ambrosia by day, until Peleus saw the child writhing in the flames and cried out; thwarted, she forsook her infant and departed to the Nereids. Apollonius gives the same scene as the wound between them: she had encompassed the child's mortal flesh in the night with the flame of fire and anointed him with ambrosia to make him deathless, and when Peleus leapt up and saw his son gasping in the flame she left her bridal bed in anger and never came to him again.7
When Ajax son of Oileus perished on the homeward voyage, Apollodorus says Thetis washed his body up and buried him on Myconos — the silver-footed Nereid extending sea-goddess care to another captain of the war, though her own son's doom at Troy she could not avert.8
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
