Poseidon

How Poseidon got the sea

Poseidon was a son of Cronus and Rhea. His brothers were Zeus and Hades. The three brothers won their places in a war against the Titans, an older generation of gods.

Apollodorus, whose Library retells the Greek myths, says the Cyclopes armed the brothers for that war. These allies of Zeus gave him thunder and the thunderbolt. They gave Hades a helmet and Poseidon a trident, the three-pronged spear he carried from then on.

When the war was won, the brothers drew lots to share out the world. The sky fell to Zeus, the underworld to Hades and the sea to Poseidon.

Sea, earthquakes and horses

The sea was only one part of Poseidon’s power. Homer, the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, often calls him the earth-shaker and the earth-enfolder, the god who holds the earth. Greeks also called on him by titles that named his powers. Enosichthon and Gaieochos carry the same two meanings, and Hippios links him with horses.

The stories that survive show that force at work on land. His trident scars the rock. It makes salt water rise on a hilltop, and it shakes the ground.

The contest for Attica

Poseidon and the goddess Athena both claimed Attica, the land around Athens. Poseidon got there first. He struck the middle of the Acropolis, the rocky hill above the city, with his trident, and salt water welled up. People called it Erechtheis.

Athena came later. She planted an olive tree and brought Cecrops, the first king of Attica, to witness what she had done. Apollodorus says the 12 gods then gave the country to her. Poseidon flooded the Thriasian plain in anger, but the city kept Athena’s name.

What Athens kept of Poseidon

Athens did not wipe out the god it had passed over. The Parthenon, Athena’s great temple on the Acropolis, showed the contest in its west pediment, the carved triangle under the roof at that end. Pieces thought to come from its Poseidon survive in the Acropolis Museum.

Pausanias, a Greek traveller who described the places he visited, saw more of the god in the Erechtheum, another temple on the Acropolis. Inside were an altar to Poseidon, a trident mark on the rock and sea water held in a cistern, a stone tank. When the south wind blew, he wrote, the water sounded like waves.

Equal in honour to Zeus

The lots gave each brother his own realm. Then, during the Trojan War, Zeus gave an order outside his own share, the sky. He sent Iris, the messenger of the gods, to tell Poseidon to leave the fighting.

Poseidon refused at first. The earth and Mount Olympus, home of the gods, belonged to all three brothers, he said. Each of them held his realm by the luck of the draw. Zeus might be stronger, but Poseidon called himself Zeus’s equal in honour.

Iris did not argue about strength or about who owned what. She asked whether he really wanted her to carry that answer back. Then she reminded him that the Erinyes, the goddesses who punish wrongs, side with the elder-born. Poseidon gave way and went back to the sea.

Which brother was older

Iris’s warning rests on Zeus being the older brother, and the poets did not agree on that. Elsewhere in the Iliad, Homer gives Zeus and Poseidon the same parents but calls Zeus the elder-born and the wiser. Hesiod, an early Greek poet, tells it another way. His Theogony, a poem about the birth of the gods, lists the children of Cronus and Rhea in order. Their daughters Hestia, Demeter and Hera come first, then Hades, then Poseidon and last of all Zeus.

Hesiod does not turn that order into a quarrel about who outranks whom. In any case, the brothers drew their realms by lot, and none of them inherited one. Poseidon’s own speech sets the limit more firmly than any family tree. The lot made his realm as honourable as his brothers’ realms, yet it did not give him the last word among the gods.

Why Odysseus wandered

Near the start of the Odyssey, Homer’s poem about the Greek hero Odysseus and his journey home, Zeus explains why Odysseus has still not come home. Poseidon was angry because Odysseus had blinded Polyphemus, a Cyclops who was Poseidon’s son by the nymph Thoosa.

Even so, the god did not kill Odysseus. He kept him wandering instead. Zeus added that Poseidon could not hold out alone against all the other gods.

For years Poseidon kept Ithaca, Odysseus’s home island, out of his reach. He held it off until the other gods made sure that Odysseus would get home.

The ship turned to stone

The Phaeacians, a seafaring people who lived at Scheria, finally carried Odysseus home. Their crew brought him safely across the sea and set him ashore on Ithaca. Then their ship turned back for Scheria.

Odysseus was now out of Poseidon’s reach, so the sailors paid instead. Before he acted, Poseidon went to Zeus. He asked what he might do to people who had ignored his anger. Zeus told him how to stop their ship within sight of their city.

Poseidon waited off Scheria until the ship came close to land. He struck it with the flat of his hand and fixed it beneath the water as stone. He could punish the ship that had done the work, but he could not put its passenger back on board.

Where Greeks honoured him

Greeks worshipped the sea god on land too. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’s son Telemachus reaches Pylos. On the beach he finds nine groups of 500 people sitting together, with nine bulls ready in each group for Poseidon.

At Cape Sounion, Poseidon had a sanctuary, a piece of sacred ground set aside for a god. It covered the highest point of the fortified headland. The marble temple that still stands there was built around 444 to 440 BC, on top of an earlier temple made of limestone.