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Thetis: Protective
Mother or Dominated Wife?
Jennifer
Powers
Peleus married Polydora . . .
Afterwards he married Thetis, daughter of Nereus, for whose hand
Zeus and Poseidon had been rivals; but when Themis prophesied
that the son born of Thetis would be mightier than his father,
they withdrew. But some say that when Zeus was bent on gratifying
his passion for her, Prometheus declared that the son borne to
him by her would be lord of heaven; and others affirm that Thetis
would not consort with Zeus because she had been brought up by
Hera, and that Zeus in anger would marry her to a mortal. Chiron,
therefore, having advised Peleus to seize her and hold her fast
in spite of her shape-shifting, he watched his chance and carried
her off, and though she turned, now into fire, now into water,
and now into a beast, he did not let her go till he saw that
she had resumed her former shape. And he married her on Pelion,
and there the gods celebrated the marriage with feast and song.
And Chiron gave Peleus an ashen spear, and Poseidon gave him
horses, Balius and Xanthus, and these were immortal.
When Thetis had got a babe by
Peleus, she wished to make it immortal, and unknown to Peleus
she used to hide it in the fire by night in order to destroy
the mortal element which the child inherited from its father,
but by day she anointed him with ambrosia.1
Though this is the most comprehensive representation
of Thetis I found among the works of six ancient
authors, it is not the most common. I took a random sampling
of authors, from Homer to Pausanias, to compare representations of
the goddess Thetis. I then turned to vase paintings and
found an interesting disparity between the representation of
Thetis on these as compared to those in the
literature. This paper will examine passages from these authors,
as well as a selected number of vase paintings in order to illustrate
the contrasting representations.
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