Epic makes of Poseidon a great lord of the sea, emerging from his palace under the waves near Aegae to aid the Achaeans in battle, or rousing a storm to drown Odysseus on his raft. But Poseidon himself is a complex Mycenaean deity whose origins lie further inland; he is the Earth-Shaker, an ancestral god with ties to freshwater springs and horses. Even in the Iliad (13.10-30), the dominant image is that of Poseidon as a charioteer, driving his golden-maned horses over the sea. He himself is not a personification of the sea, but its ruler. If Poseidon is a lord of elemental forces, his Nereid consort Amphitrite is more closely identified in the Odyssey with the element itself: she breeds many monsters (Odyssey 5.417-22, 12.90) and the waves are hers (Odyssey 3.85, 12.55). Amphitrite is more than a literary invention; she often appears in cultic contexts with Poseidon, as at Isthmia (Pausanias 2.1.7). An archaic votive dump at Penteskouphia near Corinth yielded clay pinakes depicting Amphitrite with smaller-sized worshipers, or riding in a chariot with Poseidon.
In Greek mythology, the gods who represent the sea share its unbounded nature as the source of creatures formless and strange to human eyes. Monsters and shape-shifters, the latter often possessed of prophetic powers, come from the sea. Nereus and his congeners Proteus and Glaucus are Masters of Animals who control the supply of fish and other marine animals. In Greek fishermen’s folklore, these Old Men of the Sea were elusive shape-changers who could tell one’s fortune if captured. In Greek religious practice, on the other hand, the overriding concern with regard to the sea was safe travel. Many gods could be called upon to protect mariners, especially those resident in harbor towns (often Aphrodite or Poseidon). The Dioscuri, who appeared in ships’ rigging during storms in the form of St Elmo’s fire, were popularly viewed as saviors who warded off disaster at sea (Alcaeus fr. 34 Campbell).
Homer was also instrumental in shaping the image of the sea nymphs called Nereids, who were closely associated with the story of Achilles. Thetis, the Nereid mother of the hero, seems to have played an important role in early Greek cosmology; the Iliad alludes to her rescue and/or sheltering of Zeus, Dionysus, and Hephaestus in their times of need, while she figures in a fragment of Alcman as ‘‘the origin of all,’’ a primal creative force (Calame 1983 fr. 81). Thetis was destined to bear a son more powerful than his father and thus posed a threat to any god, including Zeus, who pursued her. Like Ge, she was imagined as a powerful primordial figure, who first threatened, then helped to bring about, the cosmic order, allowing herself to be subordinated in the process. Slatkin (1991:79) relates Thetis’ humble status in Homeric epic to the fact that her cult, unlike those of the Olympian gods, remained geographically limited. One of the few cults of Thetis belonged to Cape Sepias in Thessaly, where the Persians, having suffered heavy damage in a storm, sacrificed to her and the Nereids as local deities (Herodotus 7.191). A venerable Spartan cult of Thetis (Pausanias 3.14.4) may have inspired Alcman’s cosmological verses. Altars and thank offerings to the Nereids as a group, on the other hand, are relatively common. Like other marine deities, they could prevent disasters at sea. An early example is Sappho’s prayer to Cypris (Aphrodite) and the Nereids (fr. 5 Campbell) for the safe sea journey of her brother Charaxus.
Ino/Leucothea, who was transformed into a Nereid after leaping from a cliff into the sea, saved Odysseus from drowning by giving him her magical veil (Odyssey 5.33-8). With her son Palaemon, also a sea-god and guardian of ships, Ino was honored at Poseidon’s sanctuary of Isthmia and elsewhere. Leucothea and Palaemon possessed a dual identity as drowned mortals (hence the chthonic and funerary elements in their cults) and as reborn gods who offered salvation to sailors in peril and the hope of an afterlife to those who drowned. Far more than the terrestrial nymphs, the Nereids were associated with death and rebirth. In epic, they play an important role as mourners of Patroclus and Achilles (Iliad 18.282-313; Odyssey 24.45-89), while post-Homeric literature and art focused on their ability to confer a blessed afterlife on the deceased, just as Thetis brought Achilles to the White Island in the Euxine where he was immortalized (Barringer 1995:49).
The Winds, like the Earth and Sun, were among the elemental forces considered animate, yet only partially endowed with the anthropomorphic forms and divine personalities so characteristic of the Greek gods. Depending on the degree to which particular winds were viewed as personal deities, methods ranging from standard sacrificial appeasement to outright ‘‘magical’’ manipulation were used. The winds could be invoked on an ad hoc basis, as they were when the Greeks faced the Persian fleets in 480 BC. The Delphic oracle advised prayer to the winds on the eve of the battle at Artemisium, and the Athenians prayed to the north wind Boreas to smite the Persians as they sailed south (Herodotus 7.178, 189). When successful, such efforts often led to the founding of altars and sanctuaries, like that of Boreas on the Ilissus river in Athens. Other cities, like Methana near Troezen (Pausanias 2.34.3), provided for annual offerings to the winds because of their effects on crops and their association with seasonal weather patterns. Such observances are widespread and have a Bronze Age antecedent in the cult of the winds at Mycenaean Knossos.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
The story of‘‘nature deities’’ in Greece is largely the story of the relationship between people, gods, and the landscape. For discussions of landscape and Greek religion see especially Buxton 1994 and Cole 2004. For sacred gardens see Motte 1973 and Carroll-Spillecke 1989. On the landscape and Greek aesthetics see Segal 1963 and Hurwit 1991. The most comprehensive treatment of the nymphs in myth and cult is Larson 2001. For nympholepsy see Larson 2001:11-20 and Connor 1988. For Pan, indispensable works are Brommer 1949-50 and Borgeaud 1988. For rivers see Brewster 1997 and Isler 1970. (For all the nature deities one should also consult the relevant volumes of RE and LIMC, which include much information about their cults.) The Athenian sanctuary of Kephisos is discussed in Purvis 2003. The myth of the priority of Ge at Delphi is dissected in Sourvinou-Inwood 1991, while many of Ge’s cults are discussed in Hadzisteliou-Price 1978. For Amphitrite at Penteskouphia, see Kaempf-Dimitriadou 1981; for Thetis and the Nereids, see Barringer 1995 and Slatkin 1991.
World History
