b. Needing a wife who would be at home in the sea-depths, he courted Thetis the Nereid; but when it was prophesied by Themis that any son born to Thetis would be greater than his father, he desisted, and allowed her to marry a mortal named Peleus. Amphitrite, another Nereid, whom he next approached, viewed his advances with repugnance, and fled to the Atlas Mountains to escape him; but he sent messengers after her, among them one Delphinus, who pleaded Poseidon's cause so winningly that she yielded, and asked him to arrange the marriage. Gratefully, Poseidon set Delphinus's image among the stars as a constellation, the Dolphin. Amphitrite bore Poseidon three children: Triton, Rhode, and Benthesicyme; but he caused her almost as much jealousy as Zeus did Hera by his love affairs with goddesses, nymphs, and mortals. Especially she loathed his infatuation with Scylla, daughter of Phorcys, whom she changed into a barking monster with six heads and twelve feet by throwing magical herbs into her bathing pool.
c. Poseidon is greedy of earthly kingdoms, and once claimed possession of Attica by thrusting his trident into the acropolis at Athens, where a well of sea-water immediately gushed out and is still to be seen; when the South Wind blows you may hear the sound of the sea far below. Later, during the reign of Cecrops, Athene came and took possession in a gentler manner, by planting the first olive-tree beside the well. Poseidon, in a fury, challenged her to single combat, an Athene would have accepted had not Zeus interposed and ordered them to submit the dispute to arbitration. Presently, then, they appeared before a divine court, consisting of their supernal fellow-deities who called on Cecrops to give evidence. Zeus himself expressed opinion, but while all the other gods supported Poseidon, all the goddesses supported Athene. Thus, by a majority of one, the court ruled that Athene had the better right to the land, because she had given the better gift.
d. Greatly vexed, Poseidon sent huge waves to flood the Thriasian Plain, where Athene's city of Athenae stood, whereupon she took her abode in Athens instead, and called that too after herself. However, to appease Poseidon's wrath, the women of Athens were deprived of their vote, and the men forbidden to bear their mothers' names hitherto.
e. Poseidon also disputed Troezen with Athene; and on this occasion Zeus issued an order for the city to be shared equally between them, an arrangement disagreeable to both. Next, he tried unsuccessfully to claim Aegina from Zeus, and Naxos from Dionysus; and in a claim for Corinth with Helius received the Isthmus only, while Helius was awarded the Acropolis. In fury, he tried to seize Argolis from Hera, was again ready to fight, refusing to appear before his Olympian peers who, he said, were prejudiced against him. Zeus, therefore, referred the matter to the River-gods Inachus, Cephissus, and Asterion, who judged in Hera's favour. Since he had been forbidden to revenge himself with a flood as before, he did exactly the opposite: he dried up judges' streams so that they now never flow in summer. However, the sake of Amymone, one of the Danaids who were distressed by the drought, he caused the Argive river of Lerna to flow perpetually.
f. He boasts of having created the horse, though some say that, when he was newly born, Rhea gave one to Cronus to eat; and of having invented the bridle, though Athene had done so before him; but his claim to have instituted horse-racing is not disputed. Certainly, horses are sacred to him, perhaps because of his amorous pursuit of Demeter when she was tearfully seeking her daughter Persephone. It is said that Demeter, wearied and disheartened by her search, and disinclined for passionate dalliance with any god or Titan, transformed herself into a mare, and began to graze with the herd of one Oncus, a son of Apollo's who reigned in Arcadian Onceium. She did not, however, deceived Poseidon, who transformed himself into a stallion and covered her, from which outrageous union sprang the nymph Despoena and the wild horse Arion. Demeter's anger was so hot that she is still worshipped locally'as 'Demeter the Fury'.
1. Thetis, Amphitrite, and Nereis were different local titles of the Triple Moon- goddess as ruler of the sea; and since Poseidon was the Father-god of the Aeolians, who had taken to the sea, he claimed to be her husband wherever she found worshippers. Peleus married Thetis on Mount Pelion. Nereis means ‘the wet one’, and Amphitrite’s name refers to the ‘third element’, the sea, which is cast about earth, the first element, and above which rises the second element, air. In the Homeric poems Amphitrite means simply ‘the sea’; she is not personified as Poseidon’s wife. Her reluctance to marry Poseidon matches Hera’s reluctance to marry Zeus, and Persephone’s to marry Hades; the marriage involved the interference by male priests with female control of the fishing industry. The fable of Delphinus is sentimental allegory: dolphins appear when the sea grows calm. Amphitrite’s children were herself in triad: Triton, lucky new moon; Rhode, full harvest-moon; and Benthesicyme, dangerous old moon. But Triton has since become masculinised. Aegae stood on the sheltered Boeotian side of Euboea and served as a port for Orchomenus; and it was hereabouts that the naval expedition mustered against Troy.
2. The story of Amphitrite’s vengeance on Scylla is paralleled in that of Pasiphaë’s vengeance on another Scylla. Scylla (‘she who rends’ or ‘puppy’) is merely a disagreeable aspect of herself: the dogheaded Death-goddess Hecate, who was at home both on land and in the waves. A seal impression from Cnossus shows her threatening a man in a boat, as she threatened Odysseus in the Straits of Messina. The account quoted by Tzetzes seems to have been mistakenly deduced from an ancient vase-painting in which Amphitrite stands beside a pool occupied by a dog-headed monster; on the other side of the vase is a drowned hero caught between two dog-headed triads of goddesses at the entrance to the Underworld.
3. Poseidon’s attempts to take possession of certain cities are political myths. His dispute over Athens suggests an unsuccessful attempt to make him the city’s tutelary deity in place of Athene. Yet her victory was impaired by a concession to patriarchy: the Athenians abandoned the Cretan custom which prevailed in Caria until Classical times (Herodotus) when they ceased to take their mother’s names. Varro, who gives this detail, represents the trial as a plebiscite of all the men and women of Athens. It is plain that the Ionian Pelasgians of Athens were defeated by the Aeolians, and that Athene regained her sovereignty only by alliance with Zeus’s Achaeans, who later made her disown Poseidon’s paternity and admit herself reborn from Zeus’s head.
4. The cultivated olive was originally imported from Libya, which supports the myth of Athene’s Libyan origin; but what she brought will have been only a cutting-the cultivated olive does not breed true, but must always be grafted on the oleaster, or wild olive. Her tree was still shown at Athens during the second century AD. The flooding of the Thriasian Plain is likely to be a historical event, but cannot be dated. It is possible that early in the fourteenth century BC, which meteorologists reckon to have been a period of maximum rainfall, the rivers of Arcadia never ran dry, and that their subsequent shrinking was attributed to the vengeance of Poseidon. Pre-Hellenic Sun-worship at Corinth is well established (Pausanias).
5. The myth of Demeter and Poseidon records a Hellenic invasion of Arcadia. Demeter was pictured at Phigalia as the mare-headed patroness of the pre-Hellenic horse cult. Horses were sacred to the moon, because their hooves make a moon-shaped mark, and the moon was regarded as the source of all water; hence the association of Pegasus with springs of water. The early Hellenes introduced a larger breed of horse into Greece from Trans-Caspia, the native variety having been about the size of a Shetland pony and unsuitable for chariotry. They seem to have seized the centres of the horse cult, where their warrior-kings forcibly married the local priestesses and thus won a title to the land; incidentally suppressing the wild-mare orgies. The sacred horses Arion and Despoena (this being a title of Demeter herself) were then claimed as Poseidon’s children. Amymone may have been a name for the goddess at Lerna, the centre of the Danaid water cult.
6. Demeter as Fury, like Nemesis as Fury, was the goddess in her annual mood of murder; and the story, also told of Poseidon and Demeter at Thelpusia (Pausanias), and of Poseidon and an unnamed Fury at the fountain of Tilphusa in Boeotia (Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad) was already old when the Hellenes came. It appears in early Indian sacred literature, where Saranyu turns herself into a mare, Vivaswat becomes a stallion and covers her; and the fruit of this union are the two heroic Asvins. ‘Demeter Erinnys’ may, in fact, have stood not for ‘Demeter the Fury’, but for ‘Demeter Saranyu’-an attempted reconciliation of the two warring cultures; but to the resentful Pelasgians Demeter was, and remained, outraged.
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