The Nereids: From Fifty Sea-Daughters to the Village Neraides

In many Greek villages, well into the twentieth century, there were places people preferred not to pass at midnight or in the heavy stillness of noon: a spring beneath a plane tree, a cave above the shore, a threshing floor on a windy ridge. The beings who gathered there were seldom named outright. When they were, the word was neraides, the direct descendant of the ancient Nereides, the daughters of Nereus. This is the story of how a catalogue of sea goddesses in Hesiod became the white-clad dancers of folk belief, and of the quarrel, still visible every clear night, in which those sea goddesses had the last word.

Fifty names for the sea

Hesiod’s Theogony gives the Nereids a father worth having. Nereus, eldest child of Pontus, the Sea, is called the Old Man because he is truthful and gentle; he never forgets what is right, and his counsel is just and kind. With Doris, a daughter of Ocean, he had fifty daughters, and Hesiod names every one of them in a catalogue that reads like a sailor’s weather report.

From Nereus and lovely-haired Doris, child of Ocean, the river that flows full circle, were born in the barren sea daughters much longed for among goddesses: Proto and Eucrante, Sao and Amphitrite, Eudora and Thetis, Galene and Glauce, Cymothoe, Speio, Thoe and lovely Halie…

Hesiod, Theogony (our rendering)

The names are worth translating. Galene is Calm; Cymothoe, Swift-Wave; Glauce, the grey-green colour of the open water; Eione, Shore; Psamathe, Sand; Speio, Cave; Nesaie, Island. Cymodoce, with Cymatolege and Amphitrite, is said to soothe the waves on the misty sea and the blasts of raging winds. The last name on the list, Nemertes, means Unerring, and Hesiod says she has the mind of her immortal father. To recite the Nereids was to recite the moods of the sea, from flat calm to breaking surf.

Homer gives them a scene of their own. In book 18 of the Iliad, when Thetis hears Achilles’ cry of grief for Patroclus, her sisters crowd around her in the silvery cave beneath the sea, beating their breasts, while Homer names more than thirty of them. Thetis was married against her will to the mortal Peleus; Amphitrite became Poseidon’s queen; Galatea was courted, hopelessly, by the Cyclops Polyphemus. In the Argonautica, the sisters lift the Argo through the Wandering Rocks beside Scylla and Charybdis.

A boast the sky remembers

The Nereids’ best-known appearance in the night sky comes through an insult. Apollodorus tells how Cassiopeia, queen of the Ethiopians and wife of King Cepheus, claimed to be more beautiful than all the Nereids. The sea nymphs were furious, and Poseidon, sharing their anger, sent a flood and a sea monster against the kingdom. An oracle of Ammon declared that the only remedy was to give the princess Andromeda to the monster, and she was chained to a rock by the sea until Perseus came and killed the beast. In Hyginus, it is Andromeda’s beauty that her mother boasts about, not her own. The sources disagree on the boast; the offended party is always the same.

The whole family went up among the stars: Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Perseus and the monster Cetus. Hyginus adds a last turn of the knife: the queen sits on her throne, but placed so that, as the heavens turn, she is carried head-downward for part of every night. From most of Canada her bright W never sets, so the queen who mocked the daughters of the sea circles the pole for ever, sometimes upright, sometimes upside down.

Another Nereid has a gentler constellation. When Amphitrite fled Poseidon’s courtship, a dolphin found her and persuaded her to come back as queen of the sea, and Poseidon set its image among the stars as Delphinus. The Nereids also received real worship. Herodotus reports that when a storm battered the Persian fleet off the coast of Magnesia, the Magi sacrificed to the wind and to Thetis and the Nereids, and on the fourth day the storm stopped; or, he drily adds, perhaps it simply dropped of its own accord.

From the sea to the spring

The folklorists who recorded later Greek beliefs, above all Nikolaos Politis in his Paradoseis (Traditions) and the Cambridge scholar John Cuthbert Lawson in Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, found Neraides almost everywhere. They were no longer creatures of the salt sea alone. They lived by springs and wells, along rivers, in caves and gorges, on mountains and in the shade of old trees, as well as on the shore. The modern Greek word for water, nero, sounds so close to their name that many speakers took the connection for granted. They appeared as beautiful young women dressed in white, and above all they danced, in rings on threshing floors and in clearings, often at noon or around midnight.

Because it was unwise to name them directly, people used flattering euphemisms such as “the good ladies”. Their favour could bring luck or beauty; a lovely bride might be praised as being like a Nereid, and neraida still means a fairy in modern Greek. Their displeasure was more often remembered. Someone who stumbled on their dance or offended them might be struck dumb, lamed or driven out of his wits, and sudden illnesses of that kind were blamed on them. People avoided sleeping under certain trees at noon or lingering at a lonely spring at the wrong hour, and a whirlwind spinning dust along a path might be taken for the Neraides passing by. One protective formula recorded by folklorists simply wished them milk and honey on their way.

The bride who wanted her kerchief back

The most widely told Nereid story is a tale of capture. A young man, often a shepherd or a musician, comes upon the Neraides dancing and snatches the kerchief or veil of one of them. Without it she cannot return to her sisters, so she follows him home, marries him and bears him a child, but never speaks a word. At last, on someone’s advice, he heats the oven and pretends he will throw the baby into the fire. She cries out, snatches the child and breaks her silence. Versions differ on what follows. In many, the end comes later, at a feast, when she begs for her kerchief so she can dance properly; once it is in her hands, she whirls out of the door and is never seen again.

Anyone who knows the ancient myths will feel a shiver of recognition. Apollodorus tells how Peleus won Thetis only by holding on while she changed into fire, water and wild beasts, and how she later tried to make their baby Achilles immortal by laying him in the fire at night. When Peleus saw the child in the flames and cried out, Thetis left him and went back to the Nereids for good. A sea goddess married against her will, a child and a fire, a single cry, a wife who returns to her sisters: the pattern is the same.

It is tempting to read the Neraides as a simple survival from pagan antiquity, and Lawson, who believed in a largely unbroken line from ancient religion to the villages he visited, often did. Folklorists today are more cautious. The people who told these stories were Orthodox Christians who kept their Nereid lore alongside the church calendar, and the beliefs answered their own questions: why a strong young man might suddenly fall ill, why a spring deserved respect, why a wife from elsewhere might never quite belong. The name came down from Hesiod; the meaning was theirs. On a clear autumn night, look north for Cassiopeia in our Sky Atlas and remember who won that argument.