Then Rome, terrestrial Rome, in order to hold its own against the superiority of the Semitic navigators of Carthage, had to teach the management of the oar and marine combat to the inhabitants of Latium, to their legionaries with faces hardened by the chin straps of their helmets, who did not know how to adjust their world-dominating iron-shod feet to the slippery planks of a vessel.
The divinities of _mare nostrum_ always inspired a most loving devotion in the doctor.

He knew that they had not existed, but he, nevertheless, believed in them as poetic phantasms of natural forces.
The ancient world only knew the immense ocean in hypothesis, giving it the form of an aquatic girdle around the earth.

Oceanus was an old god with a long beard and horned head who lived in a maritime cavern with his wife, Tethys, and his three hundred daughters, the Oceanides.

No Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious divinities.

Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the Oceanides--virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock to which Prometheus was bound.
Other more approachable deities were those of the eternal sea on whose borders were founded the opulent cities of the Syrian coast; the Egyptian cities that sent sparks of their ritual civilization to Greece; the Hellenic cities, hearths of clear fire that had fused all knowledge, giving it eternal form; Rome, mistress of the world; Carthage, famed for her audacious geographical discoveries, and Marseilles, which had made western Europe share in the civilization of the Greeks, scattering it along the lower coast from settlement to settlement, even to the Straits of Cadiz.
A brother of the Oceanides, the prudent Nereus, used to reign in the depths of the Mediterranean.