‘Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?’ she asked each in turn. ‘You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.’ Perhaps we imagine that Gaia – Mother Earth – is soft, warm, bountiful and kind.

Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside.

Sometimes she can be crueller, harsher and more terrifying than even the wildest sea.

And talking of the marine world, the first of the children that Gaia tried to win to her side were Oceanus and his sister Tethys.(*fn3)

*fn3 ‘Tethys’ is also the name palaeontologists give to the great ancient sea that was an ancestor of the Mediterranean.

But they were in the middle of negotiating a share of the oceans with Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea.

All of this generation were stretching and flexing their muscles at this time, establishing their areas of expertise and control, nipping, growling and testing each other’s strength and dominance like puppies in a basket.

Oceanus had conceived the idea of creating tides and currents, which were to run like a great salt river around the world.

Tethys was about to have his baby – no sin in those early days of course: propagation would not have been possible without incestuous couplings.

She was pregnant with NILUS, the Nile, and would go on to give birth to other rivers and to at least three thousand Oceanids or sea nymphs, attractive deities who moved as easily on dry land as in the waters of the sea.