Poseidon got the worst of the three.
When Zeus and his brothers divided the cosmos after the defeat of the Titans, the three sons of Kronos drew lots for their domains: Zeus received the sky and its governance, Hades received the underworld and the dead, and Poseidon received the sea. The ancient tradition records this division as a division of roughly equal dignity, the three brothers ruling the three realms into which the cosmos was organized. But the character of the sea as a domain, the instability, the destructive capacity, the irreducible wildness of a realm that the organized divine order could govern in its movements but never fully tame, gave Poseidon’s domain a character that Zeus’s and Hades’s domains did not share: the earth-shaker’s realm was the realm that never settled.
And Poseidon himself never quite settled either.
The mythological tradition preserves him as the most consistently aggrieved of the Olympians: the god who lost the contest with Athena for the patronage of Athens, who lost the contest with Hera for the patronage of Argos, who competed unsuccessfully with Zeus for Thetis until the prophecy that her son would surpass his father made both gods abandon the competition, and who nursed the grievances of the successful deity who was nevertheless consistently outmaneuvered in the contests that determined which cities and regions he would govern. He is the second most powerful being in the Olympian hierarchy and the deity whose frustrations with the hierarchy’s constraints gave his mythological character the quality of the powerful figure who has never been fully reconciled to the limits of the power he has.
The Earth-Shaker and What That Title Meant
Poseidon’s most frequently used epithet in the Homeric poems is Ennosigaios, the earth-shaker, and the theological content of this title is the content that most directly distinguishes Poseidon from the other Olympian deities whose domains were less geologically violent.
The link between the sea god and the seismic activity was the link that the ancient Greek lineage encoded through the geological identity of the Aegean world. The same tectonic forces that produced the Aegean’s volcanic islands and the Aegean’s seismic activity produced the submarine earthquakes that generated the tsunamis and the storm surges that the ancient maritime communities experienced as the sea’s sudden and violent incursion into the land. The sea that normally stopped at the shore occasionally advanced inland in the form of the tidal wave that the submarine earthquake generated, and the ancient lineage’s encoding of both the earthquake and the sea’s violence as expressions of the same divine power was the theological encoding of the geological reality that the tectonic process connecting submarine seismicity and maritime instability was the single process responsible for both.
The Homeric descriptions of Poseidon moving beneath the earth when he travels, the sea god who drives his chariot not across the sea’s surface but through the earth’s depths, are the descriptions of a deity whose domain extended not simply to the sea’s surface but to the geological depths beneath both the sea and the land: the earth-shaker who caused the land to move was the same being whose domain was the sea, because both the seismic land movement and the sea’s instability were the expressions of the same geological force operating in the same subterranean medium.
The horses that Poseidon bred and gave to humanity, the hippoi, the horse‑tamers whose training in the Corinthian and Thessalian lineages gave those regions their particular association with the horse culture, are the third expression of the same domain. The horse as the creature of the earth’s surface whose movement and power most directly expressed the identity of the earth‑shaker’s domain was understood in the ancient lineage as the surface echo of the seismic movement below, the earthly manifestation of the same force that moved the earth and moved the sea.
The Contest for Athens
The contest between Poseidon and Athena for the patronage of Athens is among the most politically significant mythological events in the ancient Greek tradition, because the outcome of the contest determined which divine principle would govern the most intellectually and politically productive city in the ancient world.
The sacred trees article and the Eros and Aphrodite article in this collection both engage with this contest from the angles of their subjects: the olive tree as Athena’s gift and its theological status in the Athenian agricultural and religious tradition, and the character of the divine competition for the city’s patronage as the expression of the tension between different divine principles for the governance of the same human community. The full development of the contest belongs here.
Poseidon struck the Acropolis rock with his trident and produced a saltwater spring: the gift of the sea, the maritime power whose control of the Aegean would give the city that received it the capacity to project military and commercial power across the eastern Mediterranean. Athens, in the mythological period, was being offered the maritime empire that the historical Athens eventually built through the development of the navy that Themistocles organized and that won the Battle of Salamis.
The saltwater spring that Poseidon’s trident produced on the Acropolis is still shown to visitors in the location on the northern edge of the Erechtheion’s interior where the rock is visible and where the ancient tradition placed the mark of the trident’s impact. The spring itself was visible in antiquity, the water rising from the fissure in the rock that the trident had opened, and the quality of the water, the saltwater rising from the rock of the Attic inland hill, was the evidence for the divine origin of the spring rather than the ordinary geological emergence of freshwater.
Athena struck the same rock with her spear and produced the first olive tree: the gift of the agricultural and technological intelligence, the tree whose cultivation required and rewarded the combination of patience and knowledge and sustained attention that the Athenian tradition would come to identify as its own characteristic excellence. The city that chose the olive chose the long-term investment in the capacity for organized intelligence rather than the short-term acquisition of the maritime power that the sea god’s spring offered.
The council of the gods, or the assembled Athenians in the versions that give the decision to the city rather than to the divine assembly, chose the olive. Poseidon flooded the Attic plain in anger. The olive survived and the flood receded and the city was Athena’s.
The political claim that the myth was encoding is the claim that Athens made in its own self-understanding: that the city’s character was the character of the organized intelligence whose patience and knowledge and sustained attention had produced the cultural and intellectual achievements that the fifth century BCE displayed, rather than the character of the maritime power whose capacity for sudden violent force the sea god’s spring had offered. The city that lost the sea god’s gift built the navy anyway, but its identity was organized around the olive rather than the trident.
Cape Sounion and the Geometry of the Sacred
The Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion occupies the southernmost point of the Attic peninsula, the position on the Greek mainland from which every ship entering or leaving the Piraeus harbor was visible from the temple and the temple was visible from every such ship.
This relationship between the sanctuary’s position and the maritime traffic it oversaw was not accidental. The ancient Greek sacred geography tradition consistently placed the sanctuaries of the maritime deities at the coastal positions that gave the sanctuary the maximum possible visual relationship with the sea and the ships that the sea carried: the god who governed the sea was given the vantage point from which the sea and its traffic could be observed, and the temple that marked that vantage point was both the residence of the divine observer and the visible signal to the ship approaching or departing that the divine observation was ongoing.
The Doric temple that survives at Sounion, built in the early 440s BCE and replacing an earlier temple destroyed by the Persians, is the temple whose architectural program gave the god his appropriate residence at the geographical point that the Athenian religious geography assigned to him: the temple on the southern tip of the Attic peninsula, visible from the sea approach to Athens, marking the entry to the Saronic Gulf and the approach to the Piraeus harbor.
The marble of the Sounion temple, the local Agrileza marble rather than the Pentelic marble that the Parthenon used simultaneously, is the marble whose coarser crystalline structure gives the Sounion columns their particular surface quality in the Attic light: coarser than Pentelic, less luminous than Parian, but carrying in its grain the quality of the local geological material that the ancient tradition consistently gave to the regional sanctuary rather than importing the finest available stone from the island quarries.
Lord Byron’s name is carved into the base of one of the surviving columns: not the graffito of the casual tourist but the deliberate inscription of the poet who understood that the quality of the Sounion experience, the temple at the land’s edge above the sea, the combination of the ruin and the view and the mythological weight of the site, was the quality that required the acknowledgment of the visitor’s presence at the meeting of the historical and the geological and the divine. The marble that carries Byron’s name carries it alongside the inscriptions of the Greek and Roman visitors who were doing the same thing in their own centuries: acknowledging that they had been to the place where the land ended and the divine observation of the sea began.
The Isthmian Games and Poseidon’s Second Festival
The Isthmian Games at the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Isthmia, near Corinth, were one of the four great Panhellenic athletic festivals whose prestige constituted the athletic summit of the ancient Greek world. The Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games together constituted the periodos, the circuit that the greatest ancient athletes completed, and the Isthmian festival’s position in this circuit, the only Panhellenic festival dedicated to Poseidon rather than Zeus or Apollo, reflected the religious geography of the Corinthian isthmus whose position as the crossing point between the Aegean and the Ionian seas gave the Poseidon cult its institutional authority at the site.
The isthmus, the narrow strip of land between the Saronic Gulf to the east and the Gulf of Corinth to the west, was the geographical feature whose control made Corinth the most commercially significant city in the classical Greek world: the ships whose cargoes were too valuable or whose hulls were too large to risk the voyage around Cape Malea, the dangerous southern tip of the Peloponnese where the currents and the winds made the passage consistently dangerous, were hauled across the Corinthian isthmus on the diolkos, the ship-transport way whose engineering allowed the dragging of the ship on rollers across the four kilometers of the isthmus to the other sea.
The position of the Poseidon sanctuary at the isthmus was the position that gave the god the authority over both the seas that the isthmus separated: the god whose domain was the sea as a whole had his most significant mainland sanctuary at the point where the two seas most directly confronted each other across the narrowest available land boundary.
The Isthmian Games were established, in the mythological tradition, in honor of Melikertes, the son of Ino who was transformed into the sea deity Palaimon after Ino drowned herself and her child in the sea while fleeing Hera’s persecution: the origin myth of the Isthmian festival was the mourning festival for the drowned child whose body was brought to the isthmus by a dolphin and whose discovery by Sisyphus of Corinth prompted the establishment of the games in the child’s honor. The Isthmian festival retained into the historical period the character of the mourning festival organized around the hero cult of Palaimon alongside the Poseidon cult that gave the games their Panhellenic standing.
The archaeological site at Isthmia preserves the remains of the sanctuary in the form that the successive building phases of the archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods produced: the Temple of Poseidon whose archaic phase, dated to approximately 700 BCE, is among the earliest monumental Greek temples documented by archaeology, and whose architectural importance as the building that established the proportional system of the Doric temple order’s canonical form gives it a significance in the history of Greek architecture that its relatively obscure contemporary status does not reflect.
Poseidon and the Thessalian Plain
The mythological lineage that gave Poseidon his most direct connection to the Greek mainland interior rather than the coast was the lineage that connected him to the formation of the Thessalian plain and the Vale of Tempi.
The Thessalian plain, the largest flat agricultural landscape on the Greek mainland, was interpreted in the ancient lineage as a former lake whose waters had been released when Poseidon struck the mountain barrier with his trident and opened the passage through which the Peneus River drained the plain. The Vale of Tempi, the narrow gorge between Mount Olympus and Mount Ossa through which the Peneus flows from the Thessalian plain to the Aegean, was the geological feature that the Poseidon lineage attributed to the trident’s action.
The lineage encodes the geological process of the tectonic activity that opened the drainage channel through which the landlocked basin became the river valley. The same force that shook the earth also shaped the land by opening the passages through which the water drained, and the agricultural productivity of the Thessalian plain, the most fertile land on the Greek mainland, was the effect of the divine geological activity that the earth‑shaker had performed.
Poseidon’s role in the Greek mythological lineage was not simply the role of the sea god whose domain was the water and whose anger produced storms. It was the role of the deity whose domain was the geological force that governed the relationship between the earth and the water in their most violent and most productive interactions, the tidal wave that advanced the sea inland, the earthquake that opened or closed the channels through which the water moved, and the horse whose hoof‑beats echoed the movement of the geological force at the surface of the landscape it crossed.
The Nereids and the Sea’s Divine Population
The mythological world of Poseidon’s domain was not simply the domain of the sea as an undifferentiated mass of water. It was the domain of the organized divine population of the sea whose hierarchy and whose individuals the ancient tradition documented as extensively as the population of Olympus.
The fifty Nereids, the daughters of the sea god Nereus and the Oceanid Doris, were the divine beings of the Mediterranean sea whose individual names encoded the identities of the sea’s varied character. Thetis the silver‑footed, mother of Achilles, whose combination of divine beauty and maternal grief gave the Iliad one of its central divine figures. Amphitrite, whom Poseidon pursued and who initially fled but was persuaded by the dolphin Delphin to accept Poseidon’s courtship, who became the sea god’s queen and whose iconographic lineage gave the Athenian treasury at Delphi the east pediment program of Poseidon and Amphitrite whose fragments survive in the Delphi archaeological museum. Galatea, whose pastoral tragedy with Polyphemus the Cyclops, who loved her without possibility of reciprocation, gave the pastoral lineage one of its most affecting stories.
The Nereids of the sea, the Mediterranean whose identity, the enclosed sea bounded by land on three sides with a single Atlantic connection, gave it the qualities of the sea that the ancient lineage knew most directly, were the divine population whose domain was the sea whose moods and whose geography the ancient maritime lineage had spent centuries learning to read.
Visiting Sounion
The Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion is sixty-nine kilometers from central Athens by the coastal road that follows the Attic coast through Vouliagmeni and Varkiza and the successive beach communities of the southern Attic Riviera to the cape’s point where the road ends at the site’s entrance.
The visit by public bus from Athens is possible but slow: the express service from the Pedion tou Areos bus terminal reaches Sounion in approximately two hours. The private car or taxi makes the same journey in approximately ninety minutes from central Athens without traffic.
The quality of the Sounion visit is most directly available at two moments: the dawn visit, when the temple is lit by the quality of the Aegean dawn light on the marble columns with the sea below still in the shadow and the horizon beginning to lighten, and the sunset visit, whose combination of the marble columns catching the last horizontal light and the sea below catching the reflected color of the sky is the combination that the tourist tradition has consistently identified as the most photographically compelling moment at any ancient site in Attica.
The archaeological site includes the Temple of Athena on the promontory’s lower plateau, less well preserved than the Poseidon temple above it but reflecting the ancient choice to place both major protective deities at the land’s southern edge: the maritime deity on the highest point commanding the sea approach, the civic deity on the lower plateau where the community’s acknowledgment of both divine protections was architecturally expressed.
The experience of standing at the Sounion temple’s western edge, at the point where the cliff drops to the sea below and the horizon extends to the south without interruption, is the experience that gives the site its quality of the land ending and the divine domain beginning: the point where the organized human landscape of Attica gave way to the domain of the deity whose trident had struck the rock of the Acropolis and whose temple stood at the land’s southernmost point as the permanent marker of his presence at the boundary.
At Olympus Estate, Mythic Essays moves through the deeper currents of the Greek tradition. Poseidon received the sea in the lot-drawing after the Titanomachy and spent the subsequent centuries competing unsuccessfully for the governance of cities and losing to Athena and Hera and eventually accepting the sea and the earthquake and the horse as his domain. His trident struck the Acropolis rock and produced a saltwater spring and the city chose the olive anyway. His sanctuary stood at the southernmost tip of Attica and every ship entering or leaving the Piraeus harbor sailed past it. The earth shook in his domain and the tidal waves that advanced the sea inland were the expression of his geological force. The hoof-beats of the horse echoed the seismic movement below. Sounion is ninety minutes from Athens. Go at dawn.
