Poseidon: A Greek Mythology Sleep Story

Full transcript

A figure stands on cracked and thirsty stone, his dark beard heavy with salt, a three-pronged spear lifted above the parched ground, and when the teeth of that spear bite the rock, water leaps upward into the light. This is Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea and the storm of the earthquake and the horse. The spring he has opened runs clear and cold across the stone, finding the low places, gathering into a pool that had not existed a moment before. Around his feet, the ground itself is trembling, a low shudder passing through the hill and out into the fields beyond, for his oldest name, older than the temples, and older than the poems, was Earthshaker.

If these ancient stories help you rest, subscribe, so the next story can find you at bedtime. Consider him there, in that first image, holding two natures at once, from the same hands that calls sweet water out of stone, a tremor moves through the bones of the world. He is the freshness of the hidden spring, and the weight of the deep wave, he is the quiet gift and the sudden fault-line. And already, before a single further word is spoken, a question waits inside the picture, Patient and unanswered, how did a lord of horses, springs, and the shaking earth come to be crowned master of the sea?

That question will be our slow companion, and the answer will unfold as his life unfolds, from the darkness in which he was swallowed at his birth, through the war that armed him, the wide and shining marriage he found at last beneath the waves. Let the trembling settle now, and let the scene grow wider than that single strike upon the rock. See him more fully, this sturdily built god with the sea in his gaze, and notice what else his hands can hold. In some old imaginings he carries not the trident, but a great boulder, and that boulder is crusted over with the small life of the deep. Crayfish cling to its hollows, pale octopi fold themselves into its cracks. Little fish, silvered and still, set into the stone as though the sea itself had hardened around them, and been lifted up for a mortal to behold. He is a god of the far deep, of the cold places where light does not reach, and yet he is also the father of horses, the one whose passing cracks the land open, and lets the buried water rise. Here is the quiet puzzle that the whole long story will answer. Slowly the way a tide answers the moon.

A power first tied to inland things, to hooves upon the plain, to the springs that bubble up in hidden valleys, to the deep shudder that ran through the earth and toppled the walls of men, somehow became sovereign of the waters that circle the whole of the world. The oldest records that carry his name do not speak clearly of the sea at all. The people who first honoured him had come down from far inland, from grasslands and mountains, and they were strangers to the great salt water. Their earthshaker was a god of the ground beneath their feet before he was ever a god of the flood. And so the ascent from the field to the ocean, from the spring head to the storm, is the true shape of his story, and it is the thread that will draw us on from one age to the next. To follow that thread we must go back before the sea was his, before the trident was forged, before even his own eyes had opened upon the world. We must go back to the generation of the Elder Gods, to the Titans who ruled the cosmos in the years before Olympus, and to the union that made him. His mother was Rhea, and his father was Cronus, and they were of that great and ancient lineage born of sky and earth.

Into their keeping the young gods came, one after another, five bright children, and then a sixth. There was Hestia of the hearth, and Demeter of the grain, and Hera, who would one day be a queen. There was Hades, silent and grave, who would inherit the world below. There was Zeus, the youngest, who would rise to rule them all. And among them was Poseidon, brother to each, sharer in a strange and terrible birthright, for their father was afraid of his own children. Cronus had come to his throne by overthrowing his own father, and he could not forget the manner of it.

A prophecy hung over him, cold and certain, that a child of his would rise in turn and cast him down as he had cast down the one before. He listened to that prophecy the way a guilty man listens to a footstep in the dark. So Cronus devised a defence that was monstrous in its simplicity. As each child came from Rhea, he took the newborn up before its mother could hide it away, and he swallowed the infant whole, sealing his own children within the darkness of his body. One by one they went down into that living prison, Hestia first, then Demeter, then Hera, then Hades, and then Poseidon, the new-born god of the coming sea, entombed alive within his father before he had ever tasted air or seen the sun.

Think of that beginning, and how far it stands from the striding Lord upon the stone. Here at the start he is not a shaker of the earth at all. He is a swallowed thing, folded into silence and unlight, waiting in a place without hours. The God who would one day open springs with a single blow could not so much as move. The god whose name meant the trembling of the ground lay still and helpless in the belly of the titan. This is the burden laid upon him at the very outset of his existence, the long dark that comes before the deliverance.

And yet a god is not so easily undone, and Rhea, the mother, had grown weary of surrendering her children to that hunger. Now the old tellers do not agree on how the young god came out again into the light, and where they differ we will walk both roads and leave neither behind. In one telling, kept alive in the mountainous inland country of Arcadia, the escape belongs to Poseidon alone and to his mother's cunning. When Rhea had borne him, Also this Arcadian variant runs. She did not hand the infant over.

Instead, she told Cronus that she had given birth to a horse, and she offered him a young foal to swallow in the child's place. The titan took the creature down, deceived, believing he had devoured another rival, while the true child was carried secretly away. It is a small strange knot of a story, and it is worth pausing upon, for at the very hour of his rescue the god of the sea is already bound to the horse. A foal stands in for him, a foal is swallowed in his stead, the hoof and the deep are tied together at his cradle, long before anyone thought to call him Lord of the Waves.

In the other and more widely told tradition, the one gathered up in the later summaries of his myth, the rescue comes not at his birth but afterward, and it comes through his youngest brother. Zeus alone had been hidden away from Cronus, spirited off and raised in secret, and when he was grown he returned to free the brothers and sisters shut within their father. In this account, as it has come down through the collectors of these tales, Zeus enlisted the goddess Metis, whose name is Wisdom itself, and Metis prepared a cunning elixir.

This she gave to Cronus by craft, and the draft worked upon him against his will, so that the Titan was forced to disgorge the children he had swallowed. Up they came again into the day, no longer helpless infants but grown gods, and Poseidon among them, come forth full-statured into a world he had never seen. Whichever road you follow, the foal in Arcadia, or the elixir in the wider tail, the ending is the same. The swallowed god is loosed, the long dark ends, and the one who had lain still within his father now stands free beneath the open sky, ready for the war that his freedom has made certain.

For freedom was only the beginning of the reckoning. The Elder Gods would not yield their dominion for the asking, and so the cosmos was divided against itself, the young gods on one side and the titans on the other, and between them opened a war that shook the foundations of all things. It was a long struggle, drawn out across ages, neither side able to break the other, the very sky and sea and mountains bending under the strain of it, and in the depths of that long stalemate the young gods found allies who would arm them for the victory. Down in the dark places were kept the Cyclopes, the one-eyed smiths of enormous craft, imprisoned there in the old order. When they were freed They turned their great skill to the making of weapons for the ones who had loosed them, and each weapon they forged was fitted to the god who would carry it.

For Zeus they hammered out the thunderbolt, the bright and killing fire of the sky. For Hades they wrought a helm that folded its wearer into darkness so that he could pass unseen, and for Poseidon the Cyclopes forged the Trident, the three-pronged spear shaped after the humble fishing gear of mortal men, yet made now of a power that could split stone and stir the deep and set the solid ground to shuddering. That weapon became his His sign and his signature forever after, every later image of him would carry it, and it is the trident, remember, that we saw at the very start, its three teeth biting the dry rock and calling water up into the light.

Here in the long war it was first placed into his hands, still bright from the forge, and With it, his true nature began at last to show itself. With these gifts the young gods turned the tide of the war. Zeus loosed his thunder across the heavens, Poseidon strode into the fight with the new Trident, the earth answering his every step, and Hades moved among the enemy, unseen beneath his helm of shadow. Between the three brothers and their kin, the elder gods were at last overcome, their great strength broken, their long reign brought to its close. The titans who had ruled the world before Olympus were cast down and bound and sent away into Tartarus, deep prison beneath the roots of the earth, as far below the living world as the sky stands above it.

There they were shut away behind gates that would not open, and the age of the elder gods was ended. The young gods stood victorious over a silent battlefield, masters now of a cosmos that had no ruler, and the whole vast inheritance of sky and sea and shadow and earth lay before them undivided and unclaimed. What three brothers do with a world that is suddenly theirs, and how the lots would fall that gave one of them the sea, was the next thing to be decided, and it would decide the shape of everything that followed. For freedom won a world, and now the world had to be shared.

The three brothers stood as the undisputed lords of all that was, yet lordship over everything is lordship over nothing in particular, and even gods must know where their power begins and where it ends. So the sons of Cronus came together to divide the cosmos between them, not by war this time, for they had war enough behind them, but by the old and patient means of the lot. They gathered the tokens, one for each brother, and they cast them, and they let blind chance apportion what strength alone might have quarrelled over for another age. This is how Homer tells it, that the great inheritance fell not by conquest, but by the drawing of lots, so that no brother could say he had seized more than his share.

The first lot lifted Zeus into the sky, and to him were given the bright heights, the clouds and the thunder, and the wide upper air where the winds run. The second lot went down into the dark, and it was Hades who received it, the deep and shadowed realm beneath the earth, where the dead go down and do not return, a kingdom without sun and without seasons. And the third lot fell to Poseidon, and his portion was the sea, the whole gray and restless breadth of it, the surface and the deep, the near shallows and the far waters, that no ship had crossed. The three great regions were parceled out, one to each, and each brother took up his own dominion. Yet two things were kept common, held by all three and owned by none alone. The wide earth was shared between them, the solid ground on which mortal cities would one day stand, and Mount Olympus also was shared, the high seat of the gods where all of them might gather. So the drawing of lots answered a question that had hung over the young order since the Titans fell. It told at last who ruled what, and it gave the sea its master. But notice what the lot could give, and what it could not take away. The sea was Poseidon's by chance, a portion assigned to him on that day of division. His His older powers were his by nature, and no lot had handed them to him, and no lot could strip them off.

The command over horses was already his, the power to shake the ground was already his, long before the tokens were cast, before ever the sea was named as his kingdom, he had been the one who made the earth tremble, and he carried that into his new office, as a man carries the weight of his own name. So the god of the waters was never only a god of the waters. He held the sea by the fall of a lot, and he held the trembling ground by something deeper than any lot, and these two dominions lived in him together, uneasy and vast.

The proof of that came when the gods were tested again, and their new order was not yet so secure as the division of the world had made it seem. For out of the earth herself there rose a second challenge, and it was greater in its way than the first. The giants him, the huge and terrible sons of the ground, and they set themselves against the young gods and marched upon Olympus to tear the new lords from their thrones. They came in their multitude, heaping crag upon crag to climb the holy mountain, and the heavens rang with the war of gods and giants.

did not stand apart from that battle. The Lord of the Sea came up out of his waters to defend the order that the lots had drawn, and he took his place in the defence of the gods with his trident in his hand. One of the giants he marked for his own, and the giant was called Polyboteze. When the tide of the fighting turned, and the giants broke, boaties fled, and Poseidon pursued him across the water, driving him before him as a rider drives a beast that has bolted. The chase ran on across the sea, hunter and hunted, until it came near the island of Kos, a piece of land set in the bright water, and there Poseidon ended it. He did not strike with the three prongs of the spear alone.

He reached down and took hold of the very island, and he tore a great piece of koss loose from the rest of it, wrenching the land up out of its place, as a lesser being might break off a branch. That torn and massive fragment he hurled down upon the fleeing giant, And it fell, and covered Polybote's, and pinned him beneath its weight, and there the giant was buried and held. Consider what that moment reveals about him. The other gods fought the giants with the weapons of their own realms, with fire and light and the arrows of the far shooter.

Poseidon fought with the ground itself. He picked up the land the way another might pick up a stone, and he used the solid earth as the tool of his anger. This is the earthshaker at his labour, and it shows that his oldest title was no mere ornament kept from forgotten days. He who could tear an island from its roots was the same power that had shuddered the foundations of the world in the war against the Titans. The sea was his by lot, the strength to move the very land was his by nature, and here on the water near Kos the two came together in a single act, the sea king wielding the earth to crush his enemy, earthshaker still beneath the crown of the waves. To understand how deep that older nature reaches, the story must step back, far back, behind the poets of Greece and behind the temples of marble, into the age of clay and firelight, when his name was first set down. Long before Homer sang of the drawing of lots, the people of the Bronze Age wrote upon tablets of soft clay in a script that scholars now call Linear B, and among the marks they pressed into that clay is a name we can still read. They wrote him as Po-se-da-o, and they wrote him also as Pose Darwone, forms that answer to the shapes the later Greeks would smooth into Poseidon.

The name is old, older than the alphabet, old as the palaces whose storerooms those tablets counted. And beside his name there stands a stranger thing. The tablets also carry a feminine form, posaidea, a shape that seems to name a goddess, set beside the god, a consort whose worship walked with his. Who she was we can no longer say with any certainty. She is a shadow now, a female echo of his name, preserved by chance in the clay, a lost Queen who may have stood at his side in that far age, and who faded from the tellings long before the classical poets took up his story.

Some have thought her a forerunner of the sea-queen amphitrite, who would later share his depths. Whether that is so lies past our knowing, for the goddess of the tablets kept little more than the sound of her name. At the palace of Pylos, his name is written often, and this is a thing worth pausing over. In those Pylian, records the name of Poseidon, appears more frequently than the name that answers to Zeus, so that in this one place, and this one age, The Lord of the Trembling Ground seems to loom larger in worship than the Lord of the Sky, who would later rule above all.

The tablets record offerings made to sacred powers, named as the Two Queens, and the King, gifts set aside for them from the wealth the palace kept. Who the two queens were, and whether they were forerunners of goddesses the later Greeks would name, remains uncertain, one of the many quiet puzzles the clay holds without solving. The titles the old records give him tell of the powers that clung to him then. They called him Wanax, a word that means lord and king and protector, the master of a house and the guardian of a people, and it carried a darker shading too, a reach toward the powers beneath the ground.

And they called him by the earthshaker names, Enosikthon and its kindred forms, the one One who moves the earth, the one at whose stirring the solid ground heaves and settles. Here is the same title that would later stand behind the hurling of costs, set down in clay, ages before, proof that the shaking of the earth was bound to him from the very first records we possess. Let the clay holds a caution as well as a name, and honesty requires that it be spoken. For all that these tablets give us his name and his titles, they do not clearly give us the sea.

The people who wrote them lived by the water and sailed it and depended on it, and still There is not firm evidence that this early Poseidon was a god of the sea at all. It has even been wondered whether that shadow goddess of the tablets was a sea power or something else entirely. The Greek-speaking peoples who carried this worship had come down from far inland, from country that knew no coast, and they were strangers to the deep water when first they met it. So, it may be that the sea came to him late, a dominion added by the lot in the poet's tellings, while his first and truest kingdom was the shuddering land and the creatures that ran upon it.

among those creatures was the horse, and here the tangle of his nature grows richest. In many of the old cities of Arcadia, that high inland country of mountains and hidden valleys, Poseidon was worshipped under the name Hippios, which is to say the god of horses, the lord of the swift and thundering herd. The tales told that he could put on the shape of a stallion himself, laying down the form of a man and taking up the form of the beast, running as a horse runs. And the Greek tongue itself keeps a secret kinship here, for the The words that name the horse, and the words that name the spring of water, lie close together in that language, as though the two things were somehow one thing, seen from different sides.

The folklore made the kinship plain. Horses, it was believed, held a power that reached down into the dark ground, a cathonic strength that bound them to the depths, and it was said that a horse could strike a spring from the earth with the blow of its hoof, calling clear water up into the light, where before there had been only dry stone. So the horse and the spring and the shaking of the ground were all bound into one knot, And Poseidon stood at the centre of that knot, the god who made both the water rise and the earth tremble, the god who ran as a stallion and struck the springs.

The same knot appears wherever the old imagination turned to the meeting of water and living shape. In the folklore of many lands, the spirits of the water do not keep a watery form, but rise up as a horse or as a bull, as though the deep power of moving water most naturally wore the body of a strong four-footed beast. The river god Akelus was pictured in just this way, sometimes as a bull outright, and sometimes as a man with a bull's nature showing through, the river given horns and heavy shoulders.

So near was this creature to the powers of growth and water, that the worshippers of Demeter, before they made their offerings to her, would first give a preliminary sacrifice to Akaelus, honouring the bull-shaped river, before they honoured the goddess of the grain. Around Poseidon then, there gathers a whole tangle of hoof and horn, and rising water, and quaking earth, older and stranger than the neat figure of the bearded king upon the waves. Out of that deep tangle comes one of the most famous of his stories, and it is a story of a gift refused. There was a city still young then that would grow into Athens, the most renowned of the cities of Greece, and it lacked as yet a divine patron to guard it and give it its name. Two of the immortals desired that honour. One was Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom and craft. The other was Poseidon, and so the lord of the sea and the trembling ground came up to the high rock of the Acropolis to make his claim, and the The contest between them was to be settled by the gifts they offered.

Poseidon gave first. By one telling he brought forth the horse, the very first horse the world had seen, drawn up out of his power for the people of that place, a gift of speed and strength and war and labour all in one shining animal. By another telling, he raised his trident and struck the bare rock of the Acropolis, and where the three prongs bit, the stone opened and a sea welled up within it, a spring of salt water high on the citadel, and men called it afterward the Sea of Erectheus, a little ocean set impossibly upon the height.

It was a wonder either way, a horse or a salt-water sea called up from nothing, the signature of the god who joined the beast and the spring. Then Athena gave her gift, and hers was quieter. She planted upon the rock a single tree, the olive, gray-leaved and slow-growing, that would give its fruit and its oil and its wood to the people for as long as the city stood. And when the two gifts were weighed, the salt sea against the olive, the horse against the tree, the choice fell to Athena. The people took the olive and the goddess of wisdom, and they gave her name to their city, and Poseidon's gift was set aside. He did not take the refusal lightly. Anger rose in the lord of the sea at being passed over on that high rock, and he turned his older powers against the land that had spurned him. He shut the water out of the ground and laid a drought upon the country, so that the fields of Attica cracked and thirsted under the sun, and then, the drought not being enough for his wrath, he loosed the sea he had been given, and a monstrous flood came rolling over the attic plain, the salt water swallowing the low fields, the same god who had raised a spring on the rock, now drowning the country below it.

So the two faces of him, the giver of water and the sender of the flood, showed themselves in a single quarrel. And yet, for all his anger, he did not leave that place. The city had chosen against him, but Poseidon did not withdraw his presence from the Acropolis, for his roots in that high rock ran too deep to be pulled up by a single defeat. He remained there in another form, worshipped upon the citadel, through a surrogate, a figure called Erechtheus, who kept the god's power alive within the walls of the city that had refused him.

So even in his loss he stayed, folded into the worship of the very people who had passed him over, the sea king present, still upon the rock of the goddess who had beaten him, sharing the height with her through the long ages that followed. From that quarrel over Athens, the mind moves easily to another city and another grievance, Poseidon carried his resentments the way the tide carries its silt, patiently, from one shore to the next. There was a city upon the eastern edge of the Great Sea, a city called Troy, and in the days before it grew famous it needed walls. Its king in that time was leomedon, a proud man and a careful bargainer, and it happened that Poseidon came to serve him, to labour with his hands upon the rising stone. Why an immortal should stoop to such work is told in more than one way, but the labour itself is not in doubt. The Lord of the sea set himself to the raising of the ramparts of Troy. Picture it slowly, the god who could shake the ground and split the rock, now bending that same strength to the patient stacking of it, course upon course, the great blocks lifted and fitted and squared, until a wall grew up along the plain, broad enough for chariots to pass upon its height, high high enough to throw its shadow far across the fields at evening. He built them well, for a god does not build carelessly, and the walls of Troy became a marvel of the age, a girdle of stone, that men would later believe no mortal army could ever break. And when When the work was done, when the last stone was set and the ramparts stood complete, Poseidon came to Leomedon to be paid the wage that had been promised him.

The king refused, he looked upon the finished walls that would guard his people and his line, and he weighed the labour of a god against the coin he had pledged, and he chose to keep the coin. He threatened the wage away with hard words, denying that any payment had been owed at all. It is a small thing, perhaps, a broken promise between a mortal and an immortal, and yet it is the kind of small thing from which long ruin grows. The god who had built the walls had been cheated by the man who stood behind them. Poseidon did not shout.

His anger, when it came, wore the shape of the sea itself, and the sea does not shout. He turned to the coast that Leomedon ruled, and he sent a monster up out of the deep water, a thing bred in the salt darkness, and it came ashore upon the Trojan Strand and made a desolation of it. The creature ravaged the low country by the water, and the people of that coast had no defence against a thing that rose from the God's own realm to punish their king's broken word. So the Maker of the Walls became the sender of the Terror that battered against them, and Troy learned early, long before its famous war, that it had wronged the lord of the ground and the wave, and that he did not forget.

And he did not forget, hold that thread, for it runs on beneath the years, when the great war came at last to Troy, the war the poets would sing of ever after, the long siege of a thousand ships upon the plain. Poseidon was there among the immortals, who took their sides in the quarrel of men. He remembered Laomodon, he remembered the walls he had built, the wage he had been denied, and though Lyomodon himself was long dead by then, the gods' grievance had settled upon the city and its whole proud line. So when the armies gathered, Poseidon set his weight against Troy and lent his favour to the Greeks who had come to break it. In the telling of Homer, he does not stand aloof upon the water. He comes down onto the plain among the fighting men, moving through the ranks of the Achaeans, and where he passes the strength of mortals is quickened. He puts fresh vigour into the arms of the weary and and steadies the failing courage of the line, walking unseen or half seen among the spears, a great presence stiffening the resolve of the men who battle beneath the very walls he raised. There is a strange justice in it, the builder of the ramparts now lending his power to the army that has come to cast them down, the old debt of Laomedon paid back in the ruin of his descendants. The sea god's ancient resentment shades everything he does upon that plane, colouring his favour, guiding his strength toward the side that would see Troy fall. Yet even here, he is not without his measure. He is a god of the older kind, mindful of fate and of the boundaries set upon all things, and he moves within the great war as one who knows how it must end. His help to the Greeks is the help of a power that has waited a long time to see a wrong made right, and there is nothing hurried in it. The patience that raised the walls, stone by stone, is the same patience that now works, quietly and surely, toward their fall. And when Troy at last was taken, when the long siege was ended, and the great walls that a god had built were thrown down into the dust of the plain, the grievance of Poseidon was answered, and the debt that Larmadon had refused to pay was collected in full.

That same patient anger, turned now upon a single man rather than a city, gives us the longest of the gods' revenges. When the war was over, and the victors turned their prowls toward home, one among them was Odysseus, the cunning king of the rocky island of Ithaca, and his road home would take him ten long years to walk upon the water. The cause of that long wandering was Poseidon, and the seed of it was a single act, done in a dark cave, far from any shore. For in his voyaging Odysseus came to the land of the Cyclopes, the one-eyed giants who heard their flocks and know no law but their own hunger, and there he was trapped in the cave of one of them, a giant named Polyphemus, who was a son of Poseidon.

The giant had penned Odysseus and his men within the cave, and had begun to devour them, And there was no strength in the world that could roll away the great stone that sealed the entrance. So Odysseus turned to coming, as was his way. He gave the giant strong wine until sleep took him, and then he and his men heated a great stake in the fire and drove it into the single eye of Polyphemus, and blinded him. And by that blinding they made their escape from the cave. It was a needful thing, done to save their lives, and yet it was also a wound dealt to the child of a god.

The blinded giant cried out across the water to his father, and Poseidon heard him. From that hour the lord of the sea set his face against Odysseus, and there is no anger all the old stories more patient or more unrelenting than the anger that followed. The God did not strike the man dead, for that was not given him to do, and the fate of Odysseus was to reach his home in the end. But between the man and his home lay the whole width of sea, and the sea was Poseidon's, and the god made of it a long and bitter road.

He raised the winds against the wandering ships, he heaped the water into black mountains, and let it fall, and drove the vessels far off their course, scattering them across strange waters, wrecking them upon unknown coasts. The companions of Odysseus died by the score in those years, taken by the storms and the whirlpools and the hungers of far places, until at the last the king of Ithaca was left alone, a single man clinging to the broken timber of his ruined ship upon the heaving water.

Then and again, when home seemed near, the sea would rise and thrust him back, for the god was in no haste. He had ten years to spend, and he spent them, wave upon wave, storm upon storm, until the cunning man who had blinded his son had been schooled in the full measure of the sea's power. This is Poseidon, at his most characteristic, not the sudden blow but the long pressure, the water that wears down the stone by the simple patience of returning to it. His mastery over wind and wave is shown here without haste and without mercy, a power that does not need to hurry, because it knows that the sea outlast all who sail upon it.

And when the ten years were at last accomplished, and the gods' anger had run its course, Odysseus came home to Ithaca, worn and alone, having paid in full for the eye of Polyphemus. The debt of the sea was collected slowly, as the sea collects all things, in its own unhurried time. Turn now from the god's wrath to the god's desire, for the Lord of the Deep did not spend all his ages in vengeance. There was a Nereid named Amphitrite, one of the fifty daughters of Nereus, the old man of the sea, and of Doris his wife, the shining company of the sea maidens who dwell in the waves.

Poseidon looked upon her, and wished to make her his queen, and here the old tellers do not agree, and it is worth holding both of their tales in the mind, for each shows a different face of the courtship. If we may believe Hygienus, Amphitrite did not wish to be one. She fled from the desire of the sea-god to guard the freedom of her maidenhood, and she went far to the west, all the way to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the known world, hiding herself among those distant peaks where she thought the reach of Poseidon might not find her.

But Eustathius tells the tale otherwise. In his telling, the god first saw her dancing with her sisters upon the island of Naxos, moving in the ring of the sea maidens upon the shore, and the sight of her dancing so seized him that he carried her away then and there, a flight to the ends of the earth, a dance upon a bright island, the sources let both stand, and neither cancels the other. In the version of her flight, the god did not go seeking her himself. He sent creatures out across the world to search for the vanished Nereid, messengers of the deep dispatched to every shore, and among them went a dolphin. It was the dolphin that found her at last, in her far hiding place among the mountains, and the dolphin that spoke for the god, pleading his cause so gently and so well that amphitrite was persuaded. She gave up her flight and consented to return and to become the bride of the lord of the sea, and Poseidon, in his gratitude to the creature that had won him his queen, did not let the service go unhonoured.

He took the shape of the dolphin and set it up among the stars, fixing it forever in the sky as the constellation men would call Delphinus, a small bright company of stars swimming across the dark, the memory of a kindness repaid with a place in heaven. So Amphitrite came to her marriage and became the queen of Poseidon's realm, and with With her, the god had a household beneath the water as strange and as changeable as the element itself. Their son was Triton, a being of the deep who was a man above and a fish below, a merman who carried a twisted shell for a horn and blew upon it to raise or calm the waves at his father's bidding.

By various accounts there were daughters also, a Rhodos whose parentage the tellers dispute, and one named Benthezichyme, whose name itself means the deep swell of the sea, so that even in her naming she was a wave. The children of that union carried the nature of the water in their very bodies, and the The queen herself was no gentle mistress of a still pool. Amphitrite was the sea made into a person, and the sea is not tame. Her brood is said to have included the seals that haul themselves onto the rocks, and the dolphins that arc through the swell.

And it is said, too, that she bred the monsters of the deep, the great and terrible things that move in the darkness below the keels of ships. Her waves were her own, and she drove them against the rocks in their thousands, the white water bursting upon the stone, and in that crashing surf lay danger for every sailor who came too near a rocky coast. The household of Poseidon, then, was a household of water in all its moods—the calm and the storm, the playing dolphin and the lurking monster, the gentle swell and the wave that breaks a ship—a family as perilous and as beautiful and as impossible to hold as the sea that was their home and their kingdom, forever shifting, forever the same.

From that household of the deep, the story turns back to another of Poseidon's children, one born not in the water, but from blood spilled upon dry land, far from the tide, the sea god's line did not run only through amphitrite and her sea brood. It ran also through stranger unions, and one of the strangest is set down by Hesiod in the Theogony, a tale of Poseidon and Medusa, that begins in beauty and ends in horror, and gives to the world a creature of surpassing grace. Medusa, in the older telling, was not always the monster she became. She was one of three sisters, and where her siblings were deathless, she alone was mortal, and it was she whom Poseidon desired. The two came together, the Lord of the Sea, and the maiden with the serpent fate before her, and from that union a seed was planted that would not come to light for a long age of the world. For between the joining and the birth there fell the whole story of Medusa's undoing. Her hair turned to a nest of snakes, her gaze made into a thing that turned the living to cold stone, her lonely dwelling ringed with the standing shapes of men who had looked upon her and been fixed forever.

It was to that dwelling that the hero Perseus came, guided and armed by the gods, walking backward and watching her only in the mirror of a polished shield so that her eyes could not catch his own. He struck once, and the head was severed, and in the moment of that severing the long-hidden gift of Poseidon at last came forth. From the blood and the The ruin of Medusa's body sprang the winged horse Pegasus, white and sudden and already able to fly, the offspring of the sea-god leaping living from the wreck of the mortal mother.

The tellers describe him rising as though the wound itself had loosed a bird, a horse with the wings of a great bird upon his shoulders, shaking the dark drops from his coat and lifting into the air. Pegasus carried the nature of his father in him, the union of the horse and the welling of water, and this he showed upon the slopes of Mount Helicon. there, where the mountain rose over the groves that later ages would give to the muses, the winged horse came down and struck the ground with his hoof. Where the hoof fell the rock opened, and a spring broke out of the dry stone and ran clear and cold down the hillside.

named it Hippocrene, which is to say, the fountain of the horse, the water called up by a horse's tread. In that small event, the whole double nature of Poseidon is gathered into a single image. He is the father of horses and the opener of springs, and in Greek the very words for the horse and for the welling water lie close to one another, so that when the hoof of his sun broke open, Hippocreen, it was the God's own signature written upon the mountain, the horse and the water bound together once more.

This binding of the god to the horse and to the moving water is no single accident of one myth. It returns again in the tale of another horse of his getting, a darker and swifter creature named Arion, whose birth carries the story into the wild uplands of Arcadia and into a union stranger still. By most accounts Poseidon fathered Arion upon Demeter, his own sister, the great goddess of the grain, and the manner of that fathering the old poets tell with a certain awe. For Demeter, in her grief and her anger, had gone wandering, and in the region of Beotia she came to the fountain called Tilfowsa.

And there she took upon herself the shape of a mare, and mingled with the mares of the field, thinking to hide herself among them. But Poseidon was not deceived. Seeing the goddess in her mare's form, he took upon himself the shape of a stallion, and so, horse to horse beside the fountain of Tilfusa, the two came together. A scholar writing upon the Iliad set this down, and he cited the old cyclic poets as his authority, and he says that Demeter went to that place as Erenys, which is to say as the fury, the goddess, in her aspect of wrath and darkness rather than of harvest and plenty.

From that mating beside the water came Arion, the swift dark horse, born of two gods who had put on the bodies of beasts. Not all the tellers agree upon his parentage, and it is right to hold the other tales beside this one. Some said that Arion was the child of Gaia, the earth herself, sprung from the ground as so many wonders were. Others gave him a stranger lineage still, calling him the offspring of Zephyrus, the West Wind, and of a Harpy, one of the swift storm spirits, as though his speed had been bred into him from the very winds. The Iliad itself does not trouble with his begetting. It remembers only what he could do, naming him the swift horse of Adrastus, and saying that he was of heavenly stock, a horse whose descent was divine, and whose fleetness on the plain was beyond the run of any mortal beast. So the same creature is at once the son of the sea-god upon the grain-goddess, and the child of the earth, and the offspring of the wind, and the poets let the variants stand side by side, each preserving some truth about a horse, too swift to be holy of this world.

That union of Poseidon and Demeter beside the fountain was not only a story the poets told, it was a thing the people of Arcadia kept alive in their worship, in the old sanctuaries of the mountain country, where the two gods were honoured together and their joining remembered in stone and right. The high inland valleys of Arcadia were among the most ancient holy places of the Greek world, and there the sea-god, who was also the horse-god, and the grain-goddess, who could wear the shape of a mare, were bound in a worship far older than the tidy Olympus of the later poets. At Thelpusa, the river Ladon ran down through the land, and its waters came at last to the shrine of Demeter, under a title that carried the memory of the myth in it. There she was called Demeter Aranis, Demeter the Fury. The very name the story gave her, at the fountain of Tilfowsa, the goddess in her dark and angry aspect, who had fled in the shape of a mare, and been overtaken by the god in the shape of a stallion.

The river came down to her sanctuary, as though the water itself were part of the rite, and the worshippers who came to that place knew that they stood where the horse and the flood and the grief of the goddess all met. Father off, at Figalia, Demeter had another sanctuary, and this one lay within a cavern in the rock, a hollow in the earth, given over to her worship. There she bore the title, Demeter Melana, which is to say, Demeter the Black. The goddess robed in darkness, and the memory of that dark robe reaches back to the old hymn that told how she wrapped herself in a black morning garment in her sorrow.

Within the cavern stood her carved image, an ancient wooden figure, and the shape of it was strange and terrible and full of meaning. The image had the body of the goddess, but the head of a horse, and about that horse's head there grew serpents and other wild creatures in place of hair, a figure much like the medusa of the other tail. In one hand the carved goddess held a dove, and in the other a dolphin, the bird of the air and the creature of the water, so that the image gathered into itself power over the sky and power over the sea, the whole reach of the world above and the world below, the waves held in the two hands of a horse-headed goddess in the dark of a cave.

And there was a child of that union, whom the people of Arcadia would not name aloud. At Lycosura, the daughter born of Poseidon and Demeter was worshipped, and yet in all the rites and all the tellings she was called only Despoina, which means simply, the mistress. Her true name was a secret thing, given only to those who had passed into the mysteries of that place, spoken only within the sacred enclosure, and never carried outside it. And because the mysteries fell silent with the passing of the ages, and the last of the initiates carried the secret down into death, the true name of Despoina was lost, and it has never been recovered.

She remains to this day only the mistress, a goddess known by her title alone, her real name sealed forever behind the silence of a worship that is gone. There is a particular quiet in that loss, a name that was once spoken in reverence in a mountain sanctuary and is now simply absent, a blank in the record where a holy word used to stand. From those hidden Arcadian rites, the story widens to gather the great houses of the god across the Greek world, the cities and citadels, where Poseidon was not a figure of one strange myth, but the chief and reigning power. For long before the poets fixed him as the Lord of the Salt Sea, he was worshipped inland and on the heights as a master of the earth and its deep waters, and the oldest records keep the memory of his greatness.

At Pylos and at Thebes he was the chief deity, honoured above the others, his name written more often in the old clay tablets than the name of Zeus himself, so that in those places and those years it was Poseidon and not the sky father who stood first among the gods. Upon the height of Acro-Corinth, the great rock that rises above Corinth, he was worshipped in the age of the Mycenaeans under the title Poseidon Anax, which is to say Poseidon the Lord, the king and protector of that place. And near to Corinth lay the famous spring Peryne, whose clear water the city prized, and Peryne too was drawn into the circle of the Horse-God, for it was there, the myth said, that the winged horse Pegasus was tamed, caught and bridled as he came down to drink at the water.

So again the pattern repeats, the Horse and the Spring, and the God who owns them both, the winged son of Poseidon, bending his neck to the bridle beside the very water that made Corinth glad. Across the sea on the island of Crete, at Knossos, and at nearby Amnesos, the god was joined in worship to Aelathia, the goddess of childbirth, she who presided over the coming of children into the world. At Amnesos, there was a cave sacred to her, And into that cave the people brought their offerings, and the right there was bound up with the yearly birth of the Divine Child, the sacred infant born again with the turning of the year.

Beside Eilithia stood the nature goddess whom the old tablets call Potnia, the lady of living and growing things, of birth and of the green world, and her worship carried the imagery of the bull, the horned beast, whose skulls and horned emblems were set upon the sacred vessels of that people. So in Crete, the god of the horse and the spring, kept company with the goddess of birth, the goddess of nature and the sign of the bull, a whole ancient family of powers over the fertile earth and the creatures upon it. It is a strange thing, and worth pausing upon, that so much of this oldest worship of Poseidon has little of the salt sea in it at all. In deep past among the people who left those clay records, it is far from certain that Poseidon was thought of as the god of the ocean at all.

The evidence for it is thin, and the scholars who study the tablets are cautious. The people who came into Greece in that far age had come from far inland, from wide plains and grasslands, and they were strangers to the sea when they arrived, unfamiliar with its ways. Their Poseidon was a god of the horse and the earth, and the shaking of the ground, and the springs that rise out of the rock, and only later, as the people became a people of ships and harbours, did the great god of their inland worship grow into the ruler of the waves. Even his lost consort, whose name survives in a feminine form of his own, cannot be certainly called a goddess of the sea. The Lord of the Ocean, it seems, was once the Lord of the Horse and the Welling Water of the Land, and the sea came to him afterward.

Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the very name of the God should be a riddle upon which the learned cannot agree, for a power so old and so many-sided does not yield its meaning easily. The scholars have long been set at odds over what the name Poseidon truly means, and the disagreement runs deep. One theory takes the name apart and reads its ending as da, an old word that some have taken to mean the earth, so that Poseidon would be the lord or the husband of the earth, the consort of the ground itself.

Such a reading would tie him closely to Demeter, whose name also seems to hold that element, would make the two of them, the Lord of Dhar and the Mother who is Dhar, a divine pair of earth and its master, which suits well the Arcadian myth of the stallion and the mare. Yet the great scholars are not persuaded. Walter Burkert judged that the reading of the name as the husband of the earth is quite impossible to prove, and he called the element, da, hopelessly ambiguous, a syllable too uncertain to build a god upon. Robert Beekes went further, and denied that da means earth at all, saying there is no indication that it ever carried such a sense, and he argued instead that the The name is older than the Greek language itself, a word inherited from the people who dwelt in the land before the Greeks came, a pre-Greek name whose meaning is simply lost to us.

Others read the name another way entirely, taking its second part to mean not earth but water, so that Poseidon would be the master of waters, the lord of the flowing and welling element, which suits the god of the spring and the flood as neatly as the other reading suited the god of the earth. And long before any of these, the philosopher Plato had already played with the name in his dialogue, the Cratilas, offering the guesses of an older age. There he suggested that the name might mean a foot-bond, the sea being a thing that bound and checked the feet of the god as he tried to walk through it, or else that it came from a word for one who knew many things, the god being wise and deep in his knowledge.

So the meaning of the name runs off in as many directions as the god has faces, earth and water and the foot caught in the surf and the mind that knows the hidden things, and no single reading has ever closed the question. The name keeps it secret, much as Despoina keeps hers, a word spoken for ages and never quite understood. The tale that carries Poseidon furthest from the shore, and yet never quite lets him leave the water, is one that comes not from the old poets, but from a philosopher.

In the dialogues he named the Timaeus and the Critias, Plato set down the account of a lost island called Atlantis, and he gave that island to Poseidon as his own portion, a kingdom above the waves as surely as the deep was his kingdom beneath them. When the gods divided the regions of the earth among themselves, so the story runs. This great island in the western ocean fell to Poseidon, and he took it for his own and made it after his own nature. He shaped the land with his own hands, and he shaped it in the pattern that pleased him best, which was the pattern of water and earth set in turn.

At the heart of the island he raised a low hill, and around that hill he drew rings. Circles of sea and circles of land laid one within the other, so that ring of water enclosed ring of earth, and that earth another belt of water, until the centre sat guarded by a wheel of channels no ship could cross without leave. It was the work of a god who thought in tides, a fortress made of the very element he ruled, and it needed no wall of stone that the sea itself could not better provide.

Where he wished for sweet water, he brought it forth, two springs rising within the innermost ring, one warm and one cold, so that even in the middle of his ocean kingdom the old gift of the welling spring was not forgotten. And he fathered there a royal line, a house of kings born to rule the rings of Atlantis in his name. From his blood came the lords of that island, and they held it for long ages in wealth and order, tending its orchards and its harbours and its temples, keeping the memory of the god who had raised their home out of the sea and set them over it.

Plato tells that they prospered greatly while the divine portion in them stayed strong, and that they faltered only when it thinned and the mortal part grew heavy in them. In the end the island was lost, sunk beneath the waves from which its maker had lifted it, so that the sea took back into itself the kingdom the sea god had made. It is a fitting last image of Poseidon, this founder of a vanished realm, a god who could raise a whole world of ringed water, and set his children as its kings, and who in the end held nothing of it but the ocean that closed over its name.

So the question that has followed this whole telling may now be answered, gently. In the quiet where it was first asked, how is it that one god came to hold the sea, and the earthquake, and the horse, and the spring, and the flood, three or four powers that seemed to have little to do with one another, gathered into a single dark bearded lord? The old poets gave one answer, plain and clean. When the Titans had fallen, and the three brothers stood as masters of the cosmos, they cast lots to divide the world between them.

Zeus drew the wide sky, Hades drew the dim country of the dead, and to Poseidon fell the grey sea, while the earth and high Olympus were left common to all three. By that drawing of lots, said Homer, the sea became his, an inheritance settled by chance among brothers. Yet the deeper answer lies further back than any drawing of lots, in the far inland country where his worship began. Before he was ever the Lord of the Ocean, Poseidon was the earthshaker, the one whose title in the oldest records, is the Shaker of the Ground, the god whose anger was felt not in the storm at sea, but in the trembling of the solid land. He was the stallion, worshipped in the Arcadian hills as Poseidon of the Horse, taking the shape of a great dark horse among the mares. He was the striker of springs, the god who brought water welling up out of dry rock, for in the old Greek tongue the words for the horse and the words for the spring lie close together, and the horse and the rushing water were kin in the mind of that people. The Greeks, who first carried his name into the land, had come from far inland, from wide plains where no salt tide reached, and they were strangers to the sea when they arrived. Their Poseidon was a god of the ground, and the horse and the cold spring long before he was a god of the waves. And so, when you look at all his powers together, They cease to seem a strange collection, and begin to seem a single thing.

Water in every form belong to him, the spring that rises quietly from the hillside, and the wave that breaks white upon the rocks, the flood that drowns a plain, and the rain that swells a river, and even the tear, for grief and the sea share a taste of salt. This was the water beneath the earth that feeds the springs, and the water that shakes the ground when it moves in the deep, and the water without measure that surrounds the whole world. He is not many gods bundled under one name, but one restless power wearing many shapes, moving element itself, in the rock and on the plain, and out beyond the last harbour, and the trembling of the ground that holds all of it.

The sea came to him late, and yet it suited him, for the sea is only the water grown vast, and he was the god of the water from the first. Let the names be gathered now, once more, and set down softly in the quiet, like small tokens laid one by one at the foot of a shrine. Poseidon first, the earthshaker, son of the titan Cronus and of Rhea, swallowed at his birth and given back to the light, lord of the horse and the spring before ever he was Lord of the Sea. Beside him his two brothers, with whom he shared the divided cosmos, Zeus, who drew the sky, and Hades, who drew the country of the dead, the three of them casting lots for the wide world their father had once ruled.

Amphitrite his queen, the Nereid who fled from him toward the mountains of Atlas, and was found at last by a searching dolphin and one, and whose great waves crash upon the rocks to this day. Triton their son, the merman with the shape of man above and fish below, who moved through his father's kingdom as a prince of the deep. Demeter next, his sister, whom the old Arcadians remembered in her dark cavern sanctuaries, Demeter the black of Fegalia, with the horse's head and the snakey hair, holding the dove and the dolphin, the mare to his stallion, in the strange hill-country tale, and with With her their veiled daughter, whose true name was given only to those initiated into the mysteries, and was lost when the last of them fell silent, so that she survives only under her title Despoina the Mistress, a name that is not a name, a secret kept until the world forgot the word it was keeping.

the horses who belonged to him as much as any child. Pegasus, the winged one who sprang from the blood of Medusa, and struck the ground with his hoof, so that the spring called Hippocrene broke open near the slopes of Helicon, the horse whose hoof made water just as the gods Trident did, and Arion, the swift dark horse of heavenly stock, by most accounts the foal of Poseidon and Demeter from their meeting, in the shape of horses, a creature that ran faster than any mortal beast, because a god had fathered him, and Odysseus last of all, mortal man who was no god, and no horse, and no spring, yet who felt the full weight of the sea lord's anger. Because he had blinded the cyclops Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon, the god pursued him across the water for ten long years, scattering his ships and drowning his companions, and holding him back from his own small island of Ithaca, until at last the debt of that anger was paid, and the wanderer came home.

Each of them is set down now, the god and his brothers, his queen and his son, his sister and their veiled child, his horses and the man he hunted, laid softly in the dark and left to rest. The stories are told, and the water grows still. It is time to let the great sea god go, back into the deep where he keeps his palace, and to draw the quiet in around yourself. Imagine the wide dark sea of Poseidon, far behind you, its restless swell, well, no longer pressing on your thoughts. In your mind reach back and close an invisible door to the realm of the waters, feeling it move on silent hinges, sealing the tides and tremors in calm and order.

Then see a single candle, its flame steady in the darkness. With a slow, gentle breath, blow that candle out, and let the last curl of light fade into the night. Rest well, sleep deeply, and let the ancient stories carry you into the night.