From Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend, by Professor H. Steuding, Translated from the German and Edited by Lionel D. Barnett. The Temple Primers, London: J. M. Dent; 1901; pp. 51-58.
[51]Greek and Roman Mythology & Heroic Legend
GREEK MYTHOLOGY
Greek Religion from the Beginning of the Homeric Age :
Olympian Deities.
VI. Poseidon and his Circle. § 91. Most of the deities of water remained always in the closest connection with their element; only a few of them,notably the lord of the sea Poseidon, and the Silenoi, — have grown under the influence of cult, legend, and art into more distinct personalities.
Okeanos is a mere personification of the ocean itself, which flows around the earth like a stream. From him arise springs, rivers, and seas, and likewise all other things, including 52 the gods themselves — a doctrine agreeing with the physical conception of the oldest philosophers, and suggested by the insular position of Greece. He is hence represented as a fatherly old man. He dwells with his wife Tethys (‘nurse,’ ‘grandmother‘) on the western border of the earth, without visiting the congregation of the gods. The ἅλιος γέρων, or ‘Old Man of the Sea,’ while resembling Okeanos, is drawn somewhat more distinctly; his home is a cavern in the depths of the sea, and not only does he know all the secrets of his element, but, like the sea-gods of Babylonians and Germans, he possesses in general immeasurable wisdom. But he who would question him must first overpower him in a wrestle, and force him, despite his power of assuming like water itself a variety of shapes, to communicate to him his knowledge.
From him branched off sea-gods variously named in various places — Nereus (‘flowing one’), Proteus (‘first-born’), Phorkys1 and Triton (‘streaming one’), and Glaukos (‘resplendent’). The three first are represented in human shape; Nereus and Proteus have the gift of prophecy and self-transformation, while Phorkys with his wife Keto (‘sea-monster’) rules over marine and other monsters. On the other hand the Old Man of the Sea, Glaukos, and Triton were even later portrayed regularly as compound beings, in which the body of a fish was joined to a man’s bust. This was probably an imitation of the Babylonian and Assyrian models of this class of sea-god which the Phoenicians and Ionians brought into Greece. A like formation was attributed to river-gods, Centaurs, and Satyrs.
FOOTNOTES
1 There are some technical reasons for connecting this name with the Sanskrit brhat (‘mighty’).
§ 92. By the side of these lower sea-deities stand the Nereïdes, daughters of Nereus, who represent the kindly powers at work in the sea, or, from a more material point of view, embody the sportive wanton waves, and are figured in the form of lovely maidens. Especially prominent among them are Poseidon’s wife Amphitrite (‘she who flows round 53 about’), Thetis, the mother of Achilleus, and Galateia (‘the milk-white’), the coy mistress of Polyphemos the Kyklops.
Akin to them is Ino-Leukothea, who was invoked as saviour in distress by sea; for the Nereids themselves are also called Leukotheai (‘white goddesses’). On the other hand Ino became a by-form of Aphrodite-Astarte, who bore sway over the sea; and in the same way her son Melikertes was developed out of the sun-god and city-god Melqart of Tyre. Like the latter he was worshipped as protector of seafarers, but represented as a child in the arms of his mother, who is said to have sprung with him in frenzy into the sea, or as standing upon a dolphin. His by-name Palaimon (‘Wrestler’) points to his share in the celebration of the Isthmian Games. He had a sanctuary near Corinth, which had been an old seat of Phoenician trade.
§ 93. The destructive power of the perils menacing the seafarer was on the other hand incarnated in the monsters Skylla and Charybdis. The former appears as a maiden from whose body grow out six long necks with hounds’ heads, that snatch the oarsmen from ships; Charybdis however is only vaguely described by Homer as a monster that thrice a day sucks in the tide. Both were later localised in the Straits of Messina; but both may have originally had their seat at the Skyllaian promontory on the eastern coast of Argolis. at the bottom of the story of Skylla may lie a sailor’s tale of the kraken or devil-fish, which sometimes grows to a gigantic size; Charybdis is obviously nothing but a dangerous whirlpool.
§ 94. Far higher in character than any of these beings is Poseidon, the lord of the sea, and hence of all waters in general. He is brother of Zeus and Hades. The emblem of his might and the weapon with which he can cleave rocks and carve out valleys in the midst of mountains is the trident, properly a kind of harpoon which was used by fishers in spearing dolphins or tunnies. He is the national god of the Ionians, whose chief pursuits were fishing and seafaring, and 54 his son Theseus is their national hero. His worship however is older than that of the latter, for it came with the Ionian immigration into Asia, where the Panionia were celebrated in his honour at the promontory of Mykale as the festival of the union of all the Ionian colonies. These had in the mother-country a counterpart in the games at the Isthmus of Corinth instituted by Sisyphos and Theseus, which originally were purely Ionic, like the old Amphiktyonia, or religious union, of Poseidon at Kalauria near Trozen. His sanctuaries however are found scattered around the whole of Peloponnesos and on other coasts; he was said to dwell with his wife Amphitrite in a golden palace in the depths of the sea at Aigai in Achaia.
§ 95. All springs and streams arise from Okeanos, and Poseidon is their ruler, obviously because they were imagined to have an underground connection with the sea that embraces or sustains (γαιήοχος) and permeates the whole land. Earthquakes were looked upon as due to the motion of these waters under the earth, and hence Poseidon was described as the ‘Earth-shaker’ (ἐννοσίγαιος, ἐνοσίχθων). Thus he is often worshipped in the interior of the country, in places where inland seas, raging rivers, or earthquakes bear testimony to his power, as was the case in Boiotia, Thessaly, and Lakonia. Since however he thus represents also the fertilising moisture arising from springs and rivers, he himself becomes the patron of vegetation (φυτάλμιος), and hence is associated with Demeter, Artemis, and Athena.
§ 96. His usual victim and symbol is the horse, the type of the raging wave. Hence he travels over the sea in a car drawn by swart horses with golden manes when he sways waves and winds. In earthquakes again men apparently thought they heard the rolling of his car as it dashed along underground; and thus he also comes into connection with the nether world. He himself in the form of a horse, (Π. ἵρριος) begot by an Erinys or Harpy, Arion, the war-horse of Adrastos, or made it spring forth by a blow of his trident from a rock, in the same way as in his contest
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with Athena he raised up a salt spring on the Akropolis of Athens.
Besides the horse, the bull, which embodies the wild power of the billow, and its reverse the dolphin, which chiefly appears in a quiet sea, were hallowed and dear to Poseidon. Art represented him as like Zeus; but his features display not so much sublime calm as mighty force, which constitutes his chief quality. He is moreover figured as the type of the weather-worn seaman; his eye looks into the distance, his beard and hair are roughened by storm. Often too he is portrayed with his foot planted high up, as fishermen and sailors are wont to stand, fully clad in earlier times, later with the upper body naked.
The Lateran Poseidon. Rome.
§ 97. Like the billows of the sea, the waves of rushing rivers by their wild force and their bellowing roar suggested the idea that in such rivers a mighty bull was at work. Hence in earlier times river-gods were figured as bulls with a man’s face; but already in Homer they appear in complete human shape, and even later art indicates but seldom their nature by small bulls’ horns, commonly characterising them by simply assigning to them an urn. The most revered of them are Acheloos the opponent of Herakles and Alpheios the lover of the fountain-nymph Arethusa, who fled from his wooing through the sea to the peninsula of Ortygia at Syracuse. The finest statue of a river-god that can be identified with certainty is that of the Nile in the Vatican.
§ 98. The Silenoi are Phrygian-Ionic gods of rivers and fountains, whose figure, like those of the Centaurs, was originally compounded of the bodies of a man and a horse. Their chief representative is the Silenos Marsyas, the god of the river of that name which rises at Kelainai in Phrygia. As inventor of Phrygian flute-playing he was said to have challenged the harper Apollon to a contest; being defeated by him, he was flayed alive, and his blown skin was hung up by his fountain in Kelainai. As skins however served to hold water, it is possible that a skin was originally assigned to him, as the urn to river-gods, merely to characterise his nature, and 58 that the story of the contest is thus to be regarded as a later fiction to interpret this attribute.
In Athens the Silenoi attendant on Dionysos were confused with the goat-like Peloponnesian Satyroi, who about the time of Peisistratos had been introduced from Corinth for the festal songs and dances of the Great Dionysia.
§ 99. The vivifying power of water was especially embodied in the figures of the Nymphs, who appear in the form of young and lightly-clad maidens or women wherever water exerts this force. This it does most manifestly by springs, which from the oldest times served as places of worship; the springs’ embodiments, the Naïades, are characterised in detail by shells or other vessels for drawing water. Thence the nymphs spread to all places where wealth of water called forth lush vegetation; thus the Oreiades were given a dwelling-place in the woodlands and mountain pastures. In particular the vital power at work in each single tree was explained as the activity of a nymph living like a soul within and with it; she was termed a Dryad (‘tree-maiden’), or Hamadryad (‘one bound up with the tree’). According to this view the nymph lives only as long as the vital power represented by her is at work in the object to which it belongs. When the spring dries up, when the tree withers, the nymph dies.
Next :
Olympian Deities :
VII. Personifications of the Heavenly Bodies and other Nature-Deities.