Struck the Acropolis rock with a trident to raise a salt spring, and lost the city to an olive tree
The contest with Athena for Attica; the mark was shown in the Erechtheion.
Myth · Greek
Poseidon
Greek mythology — Olympian, god of the sea, earthquakes and horses
Poseidon is the god of the sea, of earthquakes and of horses, brother of Zeus and Hades and holder of the sea as his portion when the three cast lots. He is a violent, grudge-bearing power: he strikes the earth with his trident to shake it, raises storms, and sends bulls and sea monsters against those who slight him. His feud with Odysseus over the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus drives the Odyssey, and he is worshipped across the Greek world as Earth-Shaker and as Hippios, god of horses.
How to spot them
- ▸The trident; dolphins, bulls and horses; his palace beneath the sea at Aegae
- ▸Epithets Enosichthon and Ennosigaios ('earth-shaker') and Hippios ('of horses')
- ▸Won the sea when three brothers cast lots for the cosmos
- ▸Husband of the Nereid Amphitrite; father of Triton, and of Theseus in one tradition
- ▸The temple on the cliff at Sounion and the Isthmian Games at Corinth
Stories & episodes
Sent a bull from the sea that a Cretan king kept instead of sacrificing
Minos' refusal led to Pasiphaë's passion for the bull and the birth of the Minotaur.
Hounded Odysseus across ten years of sea for the blinding of his son
Polyphemus the Cyclops cursed the hero through his father.
Fathered the winged horse that sprang from Medusa's severed neck
Pegasus and Chrysaor; Medusa had been his lover in Athena's temple.
Sent a sea monster against Ethiopia after a queen boasted of her beauty
Cassiopeia's boast led to Andromeda being chained to the rock, and Perseus' rescue.
Built the walls of Troy with Apollo for a year's wage, and was cheated of it
Laomedon's fraud explains his hostility to Troy in the Iliad.
Hurled a whole island fragment at a fleeing giant to pin him under Sicily
Polybotes was crushed under Nisyros in the Gigantomachy.
Key ideas
- Earthquakes were understood as his doing, which made him a formidable and propitiated god in a seismic land — his title Earth-Shaker is older than his identification with the sea
Quick-fire facts
- •Roman equivalent: Neptune
- •Son of Cronus and Rhea; brother of Zeus, Hades, Hera, Demeter and Hestia
- •Husband of Amphitrite, a Nereid; their son Triton blows a conch shell
- •His name appears as Po-se-da-o in Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Pylos, where he outranks Zeus
- •In the Iliad he fights for the Greeks; in the Odyssey he is the hero's chief divine opponent
- •The Isthmian Games at Corinth were held in his honour
- •The Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, on the cliff south of Athens, carries a graffito signature of Lord Byron
- •The bronze 'Artemision Bronze' from a shipwreck off Euboea is identified as either him or Zeus, depending on whether the lost object was a trident or a thunderbolt
- •The planet Neptune, discovered in 1846, is named for his Roman counterpart, as is the element neptunium
- •Hippocampi, the fish-tailed horses of his chariot, give their name to the seahorse genus and to the brain structure
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Sources
- Aaron J. Atsma, the Theoi Project — Poseidon
- Homer — Odyssey The Polyphemus episode and the god's pursuit of Odysseus