Cephissus

Ancient sources and modern summaries treat Cephissus not as a single unified being but as the divine personification of multiple homonymous rivers in Greece: chiefly the river of Attica, the Cephissus of Boeotia/Phocis, and a Cephissus in Argolis. As a Potamos (river-god) he is integrated into local genealogies and landscape-narratives: for example, some traditions name Cephissus as the father of the naiad Lilaea and (with the nymph Liriope) as the father of Narcissus. Pausanias records a Boeotian/Theban account tying the Cephissus of Boeotia to a topographical myth in which the river formerly flowed under a mountain to the sea until Heracles blocked and diverted its passage, indicating local origin-stories that explain changes in the landscape.

The provided sources do not supply a consistent anthropomorphic or iconographic description of Cephissus. In the surviving literary and topographical summaries he primarily appears as a named divine presence—the personified river—invoked in genealogies and place-myths rather than described in visual detail. Literary fragments (e.g., Euripides' chorus references) evoke the river's flowing character and its effect on the land but do not record fixed physical attributes for the god.

Documented roles of Cephissus are those common to Potamoi: genealogical paternity (fathering naiads and in some accounts mortals such as Narcissus), topographical agency as the river whose course figures in local myths (for instance the Boeotian tradition of Heracles diverting its course), and occasional civic or mythic functions—secondary sources note Cephissus cited alongside other river-gods (Inachus, Asterion) as acting in a judging or adjudicatory capacity in comparative mentions. The sources do not ascribe broader cosmically destructive or creative powers beyond these localized mythic and genealogical functions.