Greek sea gods conform to a single type: that of Homer's "halios geron" or Old Man of the Sea: Nereus, Proteus, Glaucus and Phorkys. These sea gods are not as powerful as Poseidon, the main god of the oceans and seas. Each one is a shape-shifter, a prophet, and the father of either radiantly beautiful nymphs or hideous monsters (or both, in the case of Phorkys). Nymphs and monsters blur, for Hesiod relates that Phorcys was wed to the "beautiful-cheeked" Ceto, whose name is merely the feminine of the monstrous Cetus, to whom Andromeda was due to be sacrificed. Each appearance in myth
The God Beneath the Sea series of stories, "[t]heir zest sweeps you along. It is a real feat, to make everything sound so first hand." "Contemporary Review" observed a "slight decline in narrative cohesiveness" in the second half of the book, after the "fine ... reworking of the earlier myths" but felt it "detracts little from the effectiveness of dramatic and narrative motifs ... which help tie together the disparate myths so well." "The Spectator" claimed "the narrative is handled with dramatic, and comic, awareness of the epic voyage into our creative origins." Philip Pullman cites "The God Beneath the Sea" as an inspiration for