The Twelve Olympians

by Dr Charles T. Seltman

  Co-ordination of archæological and historical evidence supplies a pattern of steady invasion and conquest by Aryan speakers of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern lands over a period of two centuries from about 2000 to 1800 B.C. Aryan ruling castes established themselves among the Hittites of Anatolia and the Mitanni of East Syria, while cousins of the latter reached Northern India. Aryan Kassites first raided and finally conquered Babylonia, and a mass, led by a Northern chariot-owning nobility, effected the famous Hyksos conquest of Egypt. In every case the total success of the invaders was due to their tribal mobility in wagons and their battle mobility in chariots, for none of their victims had horses. Contemporary with these events was the first movement into Greece of the Greeks, for it appears that around 2000 B.C. Greek-speaking Aryan tribes, later referred to as Minyans and Ionians, came down into the peninsula, some of them presumably bringing their families. It is possible to say that they brought four things with them: wheeled vehicles, the art of producing wheel-made pottery, the horse, and their chief god—himself apt to be equine—Poseidon.

  His name in its oldest known form was Poteidān, that is ‘Potei-Dān’, and his mate (in classical times Demeter) was ‘Dā Mater’.{99} Dān and Dā were the divine pair, and his title ‘Potei’ is to be interpreted as coming from some form like ‘potis’ or ‘posis’, a word meaning ‘lord, master, or husband’. So the simple Minyans referred to ‘Lord Dān’ and ‘Mother Dā’—that much seems a reasonable deduction. Possibly they thought he was of the sky and she of the earth, even as other divine successors of the pair were imagined. Dān was probably sometimes, somewhere, called ‘sDān’, which can become ‘Zān’. His Minyan worshippers, as they came down into the Greek peninsula, left a big cousin-tribe behind to settle among the pasturelands in what is now Macedonia or Thrace. These people—presently known as Achæans when they came into Greece—worshipped what was at first the same divine pair, Zeus (or sDeus) and Diōne (or ‘Dī-Onē’); and it seems that after some time no one really knew whether the name ‘Zān’ belonged to the elder brother, Poseidon, or to the younger brother, King Zeus.

  Thus ‘Potei-Dān’, or ‘Zān’, if he was the sky was the producer of thunder. And at times he was a horse—not any horse, but ‘HORSE’—an untameable stallion whose hooves thunder across the wide grassland; one of the most dangerous of all creatures, and great in strength. Do not we as good Aryans still use him as a measure when we talk of ‘horse-power’? And what can shake the earth better than the wild herd of stallions, mares, and foals in a stampede? When men have with infinite patience trained and reined them, there may come one day the cavalry charge or the massed onrush of battle-chariots, and once more the earth is shaken.

  In Homer, time and again, the favourite title given to Poseidon is ‘Earth-shaker’, for, by way of the charging stallion and the wild galloping herd, the divine ‘Horse’ had become the god who makes earthquakes. No volcanic association existed for him, because the early Greeks had no evidence of any link between volcanoes and earthquakes. In general, Poseidon frequently had another title—‘Hippios’, which meant ‘Horsey-one’; and in art he appears beside a horse or riding on horseback, or with a little horse’s head in his hand as on an attractive bronze statuette in the British Museum (Plate XII). There was a story told in several parts of Greece about Poseidon and his mate which is of signal importance as evidence for his origin.

  In the heart of Bœotia there were ancient cities of Minyan origin with temples of Poseidon; and near one of these, named Haliartus, was a spring called Tilphusa, where a nymph or a goddess of Earth attracted the god’s interest, and she in her fear changed herself into a mare, thinking to escape. But the god turned himself into a stallion, pursued and won her. At another place called Thelpusa, in Arcadia, the same tale was told, and there the goddess was specified; for it was Demeter who changed herself into a mare and was pursued by Poseidon in the guise of a horse. Of their union two children were born: a girl-goddess, Persephone, and a divine horse, Arion. In another Arcadian town there was a very primitive statue of Demeter with the head of a mare. Yet another legend mentions Poseidon as consort of the Gorgon Medusa, who in early art is a half-equine creature and whose name originally meant only ‘bright-eyed queen’, another epithet for Demeter. By Poseidon Medusa has two children, the young hero Chrysaor and the winged horse Pegasus. It is evident that the divine horses Poseidon and Demeter (or Medusa) had got down into Peloponnese with Minyan Greeks who had migrated from Bœotia; but they must have had these horse-gods long before. The observation has been made that there was close linguistic association between the early Greeks and the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans who moved into Northern India; and it is worthy of remark that the latter related the same kind of story. “In ancient Indian mythology,” as Sir James Frazer has pointed out, “the goddess Varanyu turns herself into a mare; Vivasvat turns himself into a horse, follows her, and embraces her, and she gives birth to the two Asvins, who correspond somewhat to Castor and Pollux...The Indian and Greek myths are identical, the Hindus and Greeks having inherited the myth from their common Aryan forefathers.”{100} It was in his earlier Minyan phase that Poseidon was the god of freshwater springs, and his equine son the winged horse Pegasus was said to have produced the famous spring Peirene in Corinth with a blow of his hoof.

  With the arrival in Greece, perhaps about 1450 B.C., of the Achaean Zeus-worshippers, the second phase of Poseidon’s cult began. He was recognised as the elder brother of Zeus, though the latter was ruler in Olympus, and one may observe that where grave dissension arising from a scandal within the Olympian family occurred, it was Poseidon as head of the family—not Zeus—who intervened to stop things from going too far. It will be remembered how the angry Hephaistos had made a net to ensnare Aphrodite and Ares in one another’s arms,{101} and how he summoned the gods to see, and laughter fell upon them.

  All but Poseidon himself; unsmiling he stood and entreaty

  Made to Hephaistos the cunning to loosen the fetters of Ares.

  Thus then raising his voice these swift-winged words he addressed him:

  “Loose him, I pray! and I promise that whatsoever thou biddest,

  All he shall pay that is held to be fair with the gods everlasting.”

  “Nay but, Poseidon, Lord, Earth-shaker, thou shouldst not demand it!

  Worthless is ever a pledge that is offered by one that is worthless.

  How can I hold thee bound in the eyes of the blessed immortals

  Should our Ares depart and escape both fetters and forfeit?”

  Him then again gave answer the King Earth-shaking Poseidon:

  “Nay, but Hephaistos, if ever it hap that avoiding the forfeit

  Ares elude thee, I promise myself all dues to repay thee.”

  Him then addressing again gave answer the famous Craftsman:

  “Truly ’tis neither becoming nor possible this to refuse thee.”{102}

  Obviously it is as head of the family that he is ready to pay the fine for adultery and to see the scandal averted. That episode defines his status, but the most remarkable fact is the change brought about in his cult by his becoming god of the sea. He did not abandon the care of horses, and the ancient ‘horsey’ families of Minyan ancestry still traced their descent from him. Earthquake was still ascribed to him; but his main concern now became the sea and all that belonged to it. When the Achæans came south they probably had little knowledge of ships, whereas the Minyans, who had been for generations in Greece, were already experienced sailors. From the earliest times, as far as we can perceive, the Greeks were accommodating in matters of religion, and no Greek would ever have expressed the arrogant view that his god was the only true god and the other man’s god a mere demon. His assumption would be that both gods required serious consideration and an enquiry how best to attribute to them vast and appropriate spheres of influence.

  With his change of métier came a change of mate. On land he might still be thought of as spouse of Demeter. But an ear
th-mother does not readily take to ships; therefore Poseidon the sea-god wedded Amphitrite, the most important of all the Nereïds. Here, as so often, is a divine reflection of what went on in fact among the feudal nobility. The conquering stranger arrives, captures the palace, weds the daughter, and turns out the old man, or permits him to stay on in a subordinate position. Before Poseidon there had been another sea-god of the more primitive folk, having different names: Aigeus, or Triton, or—most commonly—Nereus, who had a host of lovely daughters, the sea-nymphs or Nereïds, all of whom now became companions of the new god and their own eldest sister, Amphitrite, Queen of the Sea. In the Homeric poems she has not yet attained this rank, but in those of Hesiod she has.

  The trident which Poseidon regularly carried was a weapon of dual origin, for it is likely that its three-pronged head was at first a thunder-weapon, and an earthly form of the bolt of Zeus. Fitted on to a shaft it became the thing with which the earth-shaker smote the earth in order to cause earthquakes, and on the Acropolis of Athens there may be seen to this day in the bare rock beneath the north-porch floor of the Erechtheum three marks, where they said the trident smote the rock and a spring welled up close by. Yet when Poseidon became lord of the sea his trident seemed quite appropriate, because of its resemblance to a fish-spear such as men still use today in the Mediterranean. But there is this difference, that useful fish-spears have usually four, five, or more prongs, but Poseidon—the memory of his original thunderbolt never quite lost—had always a three-pronged trident. Amphitrite and other members of this marine throng sometimes carried the trident too, and it gradually became, among Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors, a symbol of the dominion of the seas, for which reason it may still be observed upon the reverse of a British penny.

  Perhaps Poseidon is among the gods whom nowadays it is not very easy to take seriously as a deity really receiving the devotion of sailors in the ancient world, yet there is a dignity and fineness in the short Homeric Hymn{103} written in his honour:

  I begin to sing about Poseidon, the great god, mover of the earth and fruitless sea, god of the deep who is also lord of Helicon and wide Ægæ. A two-fold office the gods allotted you, O Shaker of the Earth, to be a tamer of horses and a saviour of ships!

  Hail, Poseidon, Holder of the Earth, dark-haired lord! O blessed one, be kindly in heart and help those who voyage in ships!

  In art he is generally depicted as of a well-developed athletic type, naked, very like Zeus but with more shaggy hair, suggesting a briny moisture. When the contacts with Rome became established he was identified with an Italian water-god, not of the sea, named Neptunus, who seems—perhaps because the Romans disliked and feared the sea—to become slightly ridiculous. Of all the popular symbolic figures who have come down from ancient mythology to the present day, there is only one who is something of a figure of fun: Father Neptune with his company of fish-tailed mermaids. There is a sense of magnificent incongruity in the juxtaposition of deity and fish as in Rupert Brooke’s little poem Heaven:

  Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,

  Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)

  Ponder deep wisdom; dark or clear,

  Each secret fishy hope or fear.

  Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;

  But is there anything Beyond?

  This life cannot be All, they swear,

  For how unpleasant, if it were!

  One may not doubt that, somehow, Good

  Shall come of Water and of Mud;

  And, sure, the reverent eye must see

  A Purpose in Liquidity.

  And the piscine deity:

  Immense, of fishy form and mind,

  Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

  And under that Almighty Fin,

  The littlest fish may enter in.

  Much of the myth about Poseidon has already been mentioned in the course of explaining his origins and development in time, but there still remain various details to record from the Homeric and later ages. His birth-story and that of his sister-wife, Demeter, can now be traced to the same grim Hurrian and Hittite sources as the stories already recounted about Hera and Zeus,{104} for they were all children of the cannibal god Kronos, whose story is neither Greek nor Aryan, because it may trail back into some remote Mesopotamian creation-myth. The liking sometimes shown by Aryan mythology for trinitarian theology may explain the appearance in Homer of a third person, Hades, alongside the brothers Poseidon and Zeus. In the fifteenth book of the Iliad Poseidon, angered by a message from Zeus, makes his protest:

  There are three of us Brothers, all Sons of Kronos and Rhea: Zeus, myself, and Hades the King of the Dead. Each of us was given his own domain when the world was divided into three parts. We cast lots and I received the grey sea as my inalienable realm. Hades drew the nether dark, while Zeus was allotted the broad sky and a home among the clouds in upper air. But the earth was left common to all of us, and high Olympus too. So I am not going to let Zeus have his way with me. Powerful as he is, let him stay quietly in his own third of the world.{105}

  Within the grey sea, his inalienable realm, Poseidon had his own strange submarine palace described in the beginning of the thirteenth book of the Iliad:

  Now up got Poseidon and came swinging down the rocky slope. The high hills and the forest lands trembled under the deathless feet of the descending god. He made three strides and with the fourth reached Ægæ, his goal, where his famous palace built of gleaming gold stands deep in the lagoon and will stand for ever. There he harnessed to his chariot his two swift horses, who had brazen hooves and flowing golden manes. He clothed himself in gold, picked up his well-made golden whip, mounted his chariot and drove out across the waves. The monsters of the sea did not fail to recognize their King. On every side they issued from their caves and gambolled at his coming. The sea itself made way for him in its delight, so that his bounding horses flew along, and the bronze axle of his chariot remained dry below as they carried him towards the Achaean fleet.

  Midway between Tenedos and rugged Imbros there is a large cavern, down in a deep sea-pool. Here Poseidon the Earth-shaker unyoked and left his horses, after throwing down some ambrosial fodder beside them and tying their legs with golden hobbles they could neither break nor shake off, to make sure of their staying there till their Master’s return.{106}

  The reason for his hostility to Troy was the fact that he had helped long ago to build the city’s walls for an ancient king, Laomedon, who, having promised a fixed reward, cheated by refusing it once the walls were built, not knowing that his hireling was a god in disguise.

  As a gallant god Poseidon fell short of the achievements of his brother Zeus, but was nevertheless philoprogenitive. The nymphs and mortal girls with whom he had love affairs included Tyro, Thoosa, Medusa, Scylla, and Aithra, of whom the third has already been mentioned above, while the last was mother of Theseus, greatest of all Attic heroes, only second in place to Herakles himself. The story told about Scylla is of interest, because Amphitrite, as wife of Poseidon, played a part such as might have been played by Hera, mate of Zeus. The sea-god’s wife, made aware that her husband was consorting with the lovely nymph Scylla, was so filled with jealousy that she cast magical herbs into the well wherein her rival was accustomed to bathe. The painful effect of this sorcery was to transmute the girl into a monster with a fishy tail and bitches’ bodies springing from her hips.

  Among Poseidon’s children were Minyas and, by Tyro, the twins Pelias and Neleus, as well as Theseus, the Horses, and Chrysaor and Persephone to whom reference has already been made. To this list of children one must add the cannibal giant Polyphemus, whom Odysseus blinded and thus incurred from Poseidon hostility which cost him dear. We should expect that one group of mythical creatures in particular would have been descended from Poseidon: the Centaurs. Their popularity in art and legend has made their mythology very confused, for the tales of their parentage are as contradictory as they are complicated. Yet according to one story these creature
s, half-human and half-equine, were by Zeus (metamorphosed into a horse, and that means Poseidon) out of Dia (a variant, perhaps, of ‘Mother Dā’).

  This strange god, so varied in his functions, was worshipped in many Greek lands. In Attica he was very important. He had competed against Athene for possession of the Acropolis and had lost; but a brilliant, venturesome, and maritime people like the Athenians paid him especial honour. On the island of Poros, off the north-east coast of Peloponnesus, there was his Kalaurian sanctuary, centre of an ancient maritime league; at Corinth the quadrennial Isthmian Games were held in his honour; and among the Western Greeks of Italy he was a deity of distinction at both Poseidonia and Tarentum.

  Though Poseidon-worship never developed into an ethically austere and monotheistic cult, as that of Zeus did, he remained to the Greeks an awe-inspiring but well-loved deity—a conception not altogether easy for us to apprehend. Foolish, bleary old ‘Father Neptune’ has for us contaminated the thought of divinity in Poseidon of the dark-blue hair, earth-shaking god of the sea. But Poseidon the HORSE! Every horseman, every lover of horseflesh, knows what it is to feel a good mount between the knees when rider and animal have become a single centaur-like unit raised up in power and authority over mere two-legged men, and when the physical contact between man and beast gives rise to a confidence that sometimes verges on love. Every horseman knows well that in the ‘man-horse’ relationship there can even be something numinous, and he will—unless blinded by prejudice—put up a prayer sometimes to Poseidon Hippios.