Hi! I have a very specific mythology question, and I thought I'd ask you. I'm writing a story about Eos, the goddess of the dawn, but I don't know where to place her palace on a real map? It is said it was to the east, on the edge of Okeanos, but that's all I have. On the wikipedia page of Aeaea they place Eos' palace here, but it would be an Aeaea located near Colchis, which is not the common place for this island 😅 so where would you locate it? Thanks and sorry for bothering you!
Ok so, this is both very simple and complicated at once. Greek mythology's cosmology, like many other early beliefs, works on a plane, both for the "real world" and the metaphysical one. The earth is, of course, not a plane.
Okeanos can, real-world-wise, not actually be circling "the edges of the world" because the Earth has no edges. Go far enough east and you'd end up in Greece again!
The gods' realm, being metaphysical (and yet having rough real-world locations, like the divine Olympus being in the same place as the physical/mortal one), could well be a plane, with a shape like a cylinder. Olympus and the aether would be at the cylinder's top plane and Tartarus at the bottom. Okeanos then running around the edges of this metaphysical cylinder like an extremely deep river. But that won't work for the actual Earth.
Basically, you'll have to decide for yourself how much of Earth Okeanos encircles and then put the mortal/physical location of Eos' (and Helios and Selene's) palace on the eastern edge of this.
For example, what I did for my own worldbuilding was that, while Okeanos of course doesn't actually exist in the purely mortal world, metaphysically makes a wide circle roughly centered on the Mediterranean. It runs from the middle of the Caspian Sea, north-west to the Black Sea, then along the Danube, south along France/Spain to the north-western coast of Africa, then inland beneath the Atlas mountains and cutting through north Africa and then turns north-east through the Middle East to reach the Caspian Sea again.
I put the physical location of Eos, Helios and Selene's palace on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, in the eastern Caucasus mountains.
One could undoubtedly decide the circle Okeanos makes is even wider - have the eastern "boundary" be closer to India, perhaps? Since there is a sort of a sense of a boundary of sorts there mythically.
The eastern edges of Okeanos and eastern location of Eos and her siblings is also why her sons by Tithonos ruled eastern locations; Emathion was considered a ruler of Arabia, and Memnon, in the oldest sources and still in some of the later ones rules the eastern Aethiopians (basically, a fuzzy "somewhere" from east of the Nile to potentially as far east as India). You could definitely then take inspiration from where they were settled to rule as to how far east you want to put Eos' palace!
