Oceanus (pron.: /oʊˈsiːənəs/; Ancient Greek: Ὠκεανός (Ōkeanós); pronounced [ɔːkeanós]) was a pseudo-geographical feature in classical antiquity, believed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to be the divine personification of the World Ocean, an enormous river encircling the world.
Strictly speaking, Oceanus was the ocean-stream at the Equator in which floated the habitable hemisphere (οἰκουμένη, oikoumene). In Greek mythology, this world-ocean was personified as a Titan, a son of Uranus and Gaea. In Hellenistic and Roman mosaics, this Titan was often depicted as having the upper body of a muscular man with a long beard and horns (often represented as the claws of a crab) and the lower body of a serpent (cf. Typhon). On a fragmentary archaic vessel of circa 580 BC (British Museum 1971.11-1.1), among the gods arriving at the wedding of Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis, is a fish-tailed Oceanus, with a fish in one hand and a serpent in the other, gifts of bounty and prophecy. In Roman mosaics, such as that from Bardo (illustration below) he might carry a steering-oar and cradle a ship.
Marphurius or Marforio (Italian: Marforio; Medieval Latin: Marphurius, Marforius) is one of the talking statues of Rome. Marforio maintained a friendly rivalry with his most prominent rival, Pasquin. As at the other five "talking statues", pasquinades — irreverent satires poking fun at public figures — were posted beside Marforio in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Marforio is a large 1st century Roman marble sculpture of a reclining bearded river god or Oceanus, which in the past has been variously identified as a depiction of Jupiter, Neptune, or the Tiber. It was the humanist and antiquarian Andrea Fulvio who first identified it as a river god, in 1527. The Marfoi was a landmark in Rome from the late 12th century. Poggio Bracciolini wrote of it as one of the sculptures surviving from Antiquity, and in the early 16th century it was still near the Arch of Septimius Severus, where the various authors reported it.