Phorcys was a primordial god of the sea's hidden dangers — an ancient deity of the deep who, with his sister-wife Ceto, fathered a horrifying brood of sea-monsters that terrorised the Greek world. If Nereus was the gentle Old Man of the Sea, Phorcys was its darker face: the father of the sea's terrors.
The Old God of the Deep
A son of the primordial sea (Pontus) and earth (Gaia), Phorcys was an ancient sea-god of the older generation, predating the Olympians. He personified the dangerous, hidden aspects of the ocean — the hazards of the deep, the rocks and reefs, the monsters of the abyss. He was often pictured as a grey-haired old merman with the tail of a fish, crab-claws, and reddish, spiky skin.
Father of the Phorcydes
With his sister and consort Ceto, Phorcys sired a famously monstrous family — the “Phorcydes.” Their children read like a catalogue of the heroes' greatest foes: the Gorgons (including Medusa), the Graeae, the dragon Ladon, the monster Echidna (mother of yet more monsters), and the sea-monster Scylla in some accounts. Through this brood, Phorcys is grandfather to a vast portion of the monstrous world — the dark wellspring from which so many of myth's terrors flowed.
The Dark Face of the Sea
Phorcys endures as the embodiment of the sea's peril and its capacity to spawn horrors — the ancient deep as a breeder of monsters. Where the Olympian Poseidon ruled the sea with kingly power, the older Phorcys represented its primal, dangerous fertility, the abyss that gives birth to nightmares. He is the father of monsters at the bottom of the world.
Behind half the monsters the heroes ever fought stood one old grey sea-god and the dark deep that bred them.