Individual rivers are personified in Greek myth and honoured in cult.^134
Poets and artists represent them with the head or at least the horns of a bull.
Scamander, who plays a lively role in the narrative of Iliad 21, bellows like a
bull (237). Achelous fought with Heracles. These and other rivers fathered
heroes by impregnating nymphs or mortal women.^135 Rivers and nymphs are
often associated with the nurture of young people to adulthood.^136 They
could be prayed to as appropriate. Odysseus prays to the river he is trying to
swim into (Od. 5. 445), and Hesiod advises never crossing a river without
a purificatory hand-wash and a prayer uttered while gazing into the water
(Op. 737–41).
In Italy too rivers could have divine status. The cult of Father Tiber
(Tiberinus) is well attested. The Augurs’ prayer included him with a number
of other rivers (Cic. De nat. deorum 3. 52). There were also goddesses of
springs such as Egeria and Iuturna, to whom we shall return in the next
chapter.
But the water god who chiefly interests the comparativist is Neptu ̄ nus.
Originally he was the god of rivers, lakes, and springs. (If we think of him
primarily as god of the sea, that is because he was assimilated to the Greek
Poseidon.) His name invites analysis as ‘Master of the neptu-’, and nep-tu-
(*nebh-) is a plausible word for ‘wetness’, with presumptive cognates in
Avestan nap-ta-‘wet’, Vedic nabh-anú-‘spring’.^137
Against this conventional etymology there stands a rival one which relates
Neptune to the Indo-Iranian Apa ̄m napa ̄t and the Irish Nechtan.^138 Nechtan
was the inhabitant of a síd, which marks him as one of the old pagan gods.
Near by he had a well from which only he and his three servants could draw
water with impunity: anyone else would suffer burst eyes or some other harm.
Nechtan’s wife Bóand, thinking her beauty would protect her, approached the
well. Three great surges of water erupted, depriving her of a thigh, a hand, and
an eye. The flood then pursued her all the way to the sea, thus creating the
river Bóand (the Boyne). This river continues under the sea, reappearing as
other rivers in other countries, finallyfinding its way back to Nechtan’ssíd.
(^134) For a full treatment see O. Waser, ‘Flußgötter’,RE vi. 2774–815.
(^135) Similarly in an Ossetic legend a river-god impregnates a girl and she gives birth to the hero
Syrdon: Sikojev (1985), 250.
(^136) West (1966), 263 f., where a reference to Pind. Pyth. 9. 88 may be added.
(^137) Kretschmer (1896), 133; S. Weinstock, RE xvi. 2516; Meid (1957), 103 f.; IEW 316;
Dumézil (1968–73), iii. 41. Umbrian nepitu (Tab. Iguv. VIb. 60, VIIa. 49) has been interpreted as
‘let him flood’, but this is a guess based on Neptune’s name.
(^138) The connection with Nechtan was first suggested in the nineteenth century, that with
Apa ̄m napa ̄t by Ernout–Meillet; the larger hypothesis was developed in stages by Dumézil,
cf. Celtica 6 (1963), 50–61; id. (1968–73), iii. 27–85; J. Puhvel, JIES 1 (1973), 379–86; id. (1987),
65, 277–82; Olmsted (1994), 398–400; EIEC 203 f.
276 6. Storm and Stream