Amphitrite

A daughter of the sea

Amphitrite is a goddess of the sea. The early Greek poet Hesiod places her in two families. First she is one of the 50 daughters of Nereus and Doris, known as the Nereids. Their names describe the colours, movements and gifts of the sea, so Amphitrite is one figure in a large group of sisters. Thetis, who will become the mother of the hero Achilles, appears in the same list.

Near the end of his Theogony, a poem on the birth of the gods, Hesiod names Amphitrite as the wife of Poseidon and the mother of Triton. Their son lives with both parents in a golden house beneath the sea and rules its depths. In this family tree, Poseidon, Amphitrite and Triton share the world under the water.

The sources do not treat husband and wife as the same. In the epic poems, Poseidon plays many parts: god of earthquakes, god of horses, enemy of Odysseus and claimant to cities. Amphitrite’s part is smaller. She stands for the living sea, beside its ruler. She rarely gets the long speeches and conflicts that define him.

The waves in the Odyssey

In the Odyssey, the epic poem of Homer about the hero Odysseus, Amphitrite’s name stands for the sea itself. The goddess Circe shows Odysseus two possible routes, and she cannot promise he will be safe on either. On one route stand the Wandering Rocks. The dark waves of Amphitrite strike them so hard that even the birds carrying ambrosia, the food of the gods, to Zeus lose one of their number. Only one ship has passed between them: the Argo, which the goddess Hera saved for the sake of Jason.

Earlier in the poem, Odysseus fears that Amphitrite breeds the sea creatures that may attack him while he searches for a place to land.

In these scenes Amphitrite never rides in a chariot or speaks. Her name makes the water itself divine. The poem gives her a stretch of sea rather than a story: dangerous water, breaking waves and the life hidden beneath them. Hesiod’s family tree gives a household to this same force.

A shared sanctuary on Tinos

At Kionia, three kilometres west of the modern town of Tinos, Amphitrite comes out of the poems and onto the ground. A sanctuary there, a holy site set aside for worship, was dedicated to her and Poseidon together. It was the only sanctuary in the Cyclades devoted to the worship of both sea gods.

The sanctuary was founded at the end of the fourth century BC and became widely known during the third. Pilgrims came from southern Italy, Asia Minor and Africa. In time it had a temple, a large altar, a fountain and a stoa, a covered walkway, 170 metres long. It stood beside a coast where fresh water was available.

The temple held larger-than-life statues of Poseidon and Amphitrite by the Athenian sculptor Telesinos. Dolphins and hippocamps, the sea horses of myth, were part of its decoration. The pair that the poems placed in a golden house beneath the sea were given bodies, a shared room and a public place of sacrifice on land.

A goddess for childbirth

The evidence from Tinos also gives Amphitrite a role that Homer does not mention. Inscriptions and historical records present both gods as healers. People came to Poseidon as a miraculous physician. Amphitrite was believed to restore fertility to women.

In the Odyssey, she breeds creatures in the deep. At Kionia, that power to bring forth life became the subject of human prayer. People asked Amphitrite for the chance of a birth, and not only as the wife at Poseidon’s side.

The sanctuary declined from the first century AD and was abandoned by the middle of the third. Digs began in the early twentieth century and started again in the 1970s. The foundations of the temple, the altar, the fountain and the stoa show the scale of a cult, a local form of worship, that the surviving poems hardly describe.

The poems give Amphitrite only brief appearances, while Tinos gives firm evidence on the ground. Homer lets her name fill the dangerous sea. Hesiod names her parents, husband and child. At Tinos, people built for her, made statues of her and brought her their wish for children.