The Orphic Hymns

Of the Sea. Incense: frankincense powder. I call the bride of Ocean, grey-eyed Tethys, the dark-robed queen, who swells in smooth-rolling waves, beaten by sweet-breathing breezes all around the earth.

The heading says "the Sea," but the goddess called is Tethys, the wife of Ocean. In the Iliad Hera speaks of "Ocean, the origin of the gods, and mother Tethys," and Hesiod makes Tethys the mother of all the rivers. Here she is the sea itself, lying all around the earth. Glaukōpis, "with gleaming eyes," is the title Homer gives Athena; glaukos is the shifting grey-blue of the sea, and Homer calls the sea itself glaukē.