Within the depth-psychology corpus, Nereus functions less as a narrative deity than as an archetype of primordial, pre-Olympian wisdom — the ‘Old Man of the Sea’ who precedes and outlasts the sovereignty of Poseidon. Detienne’s treatment is the most analytically penetrating: he reads Nereus through the triple epithet cluster alethes, apseudes, and nemertes, demonstrating that the figure condenses the archaic Greek conception of Aletheia as a sovereign, oracular, and juridical power. Nereus is not merely truthful but constitutively incapable of deception, making him the mythological ground for a particular theory of speech-as-being. Kerényi, working in the mythographic mode sympathetic to Jungian phenomenology, situates Nereus within a triad of sea-elders — alongside Phorkys and Proteus — whose shared attribute is shape-shifting wisdom rather than force. For Kerényi, Nereus embodies a benevolent paternalism: the just, mild, never-forgetful ruler whose fifty daughters (the Nereids) inherit and diffuse his truthful nature through the oceanic realm. Liz Greene’s astrological-psychological synthesis briefly equates Proteus with Nereus, signaling the degree to which the two figures collapse in later depth-psychological reception into a single image of the unfathomable, polymorphic deep-self. The primary tension across these accounts is between Nereus as epistemological principle (master of non-deceptive, mantic speech) and Nereus as archetypal figure (benevolent, paternal, pre-rational oceanic wisdom).