Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Glaucus was a fisherman of Anthedon in Boeotia. One day he noticed that fish he laid on a certain patch of grass revived and leapt back into the sea. He tasted the herb himself. A mad craving for the ocean seized him; he ran and dove into the waves. Oceanus and Tethys (or the sea-gods generally) received him: his mortal nature was washed away; his beard grew green and long; his shoulders broadened; his legs fused into a fish’s tail. He became a marine god, prophetic and deathless, haunting the coasts and speaking fate to sailors. Pausanias knows the Anthedonians’ claim that Glaucus was a local man who dove into the spring Aega and became a daimon of the sea, delivering oracles. Apollonius has him rise beside the Argo to prophesy the Boreads’ fate and Heracles’s path. Plato uses “Glaucus of the sea”—barnacled, battered, hard to recognize—as an image of the soul obscured by the body. Ovid’s continuous tale joins the grass-tasting aition to the later doomed love for Scylla. The fisherman-god is thus Boeotia’s gift to the catalogue of metamorphoses: a mortal who eats the life-herb of the shore and never returns to dry land as a man.