At the southern tip of Greece's Attic peninsula lies the temple of Poseidon at Sounion Head: the first landfall in the classical city-state of Athens when coming from the south, a temple to the god of the ocean.
Walking the tan dust of the path to the temple, you see first massive columns of white marble rearing the temple epistyle into the sky. Then, as you walk forward, past the columns you see the sea.
The headland that holds the temple is surrounded on three sides by water. Ahead, to the south, you see a scattering of islands, the beginning of the Cyclades. But what impresses you most is not these islands, not the striking temple, but their setting. Water. Water on all sides, deep sapphire blue: the wine-dark sea. The smell of salt. Fishing boats pass, occasionally a freighter, though my companions and I saw surprisingly little shipping when we visited last October.
The sea holds Greece in her arms. On Crete and other Greek islands, towns still exist that -- except for rugged paths not useful for carrying supplies -- you can only reach by boat. The airlines have scheduled more flights than previously, but the main way to the islands is still by ferry. The restaurant specials of the day are seafood and fish. To visit Greece is to learn how much this country is founded on the sea.
In turn, the ancient Greeks wor shipped the ocean. We later recipients of Greek myth tend to lose sight of that devotion, regarding the Olympian pantheon of 12 as most important. However, the cult of the 12 deities at Olympia was a relatively late introduction of the sixth century B.C., as Norman O. Brown notes in Hermes the Thief, intended to bring logic and order to the rituals of a host of formerly autonomous communities -- the cult possibly an import from Asia Minor, as Walter Burkert says in Greek Religion. If you ignore the Olympians, however, and list the total number of goddesses and gods worshipped by ancient Greeks, as many as half are deities of ocean. In the earliest myths, and in the origins of many goddesses and gods we think completely unoceanic, you can find salt water.
The sea was present at creation. In perhaps the oldest Greek creation myth, according to Carl Kerényi in The Gods of the Greeks, all living things were born of the union of the Sea-Mother, Tethys, and Oceanus, god of the river Ocean surrounding the outer edge of Earth.
Tethys and Oceanus shared with most other Greek sea deities their non-Olympian status. Possibly these goddesses and gods remained as relics of worship from tribes before the Greeks. Certainly the Minoan Cretans were known as seafarers, as were the early Shore Dwellers from whom the northern Greek horsemen took the mainland. In classical times, the non-Olympian sea deities existed beside and even seemingly in ignorance of Olympian Poseidon, their nominal king.
Though Poseidon was an early god, mentioned as Poteidan in offerings by the Minoans, according to Rodney Castleden in Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete, Kerényi notes this early Poteidan was not a god of the sea. Kerényi translates his name as "Husband of the Goddess Da": Husband of Earth. Early Poseidon was god of the bull and horse, god of the earthquake. He only later received rulership of the sea, as a brother and arm of Olympian Sky-Father Zeus, at his marriage to sea-goddess Amphitrite.
However, the Greeks did accord Poseidon sea-worship. Burkert notes that the trident, given Poseidon by Queen-Titaness Rhea's consorts the Telchines, is particularly used in tuna-fishing, first fruits of which were given to Poseidon. In his sea-aspect, Poseidon was oracular; the oracle of the dead at Cape Tainaron was under his dominion, according to Burkert. Burkert also notes that some authorities gave Poseidon original ownership of the oracle at Delphi.
We can perhaps best understand Poseidon and other Greek sea deities, whose roots Burkert says reach back to the Early Neolithic of 7000 B.C., as palimpsests: one thing set over another over another. In the known material, some gods and goddesses have only a nominal relationship to the sea, yet the sheer number of these underlines the Greeks' deep connection to ocean. A name connected to or familial relationship with the sea may denote sea-related worship at some unknown time or place.
For some goddesses and gods, an impressive list, their whole being and purpose was the sea. The sons of Tethys and Oceanus included the sea-deities Phorkys, Nereus and Thaumas, "Sea Wonder." Like Proteus, whose parents were not named in myth, Phorkys and Nereus had the power to change shape, which Nereus used in wrestling the hero Hercules. Proteus similarly fought the hero Menelaos, who changed to a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a pig, water and a tree. Kerényi and Burkert both theorize that Phorkys, Nereus and Proteus all referred to the same shape-changing sea god, who co-ruled the waves before Poseidon's advent.
Of Tethys and Oceanus's daughters the Oceanids, Callirhoe and Amphiro were goddesses of the sea's flux; Plexaura and Galaxaura, of wind and calm; Thoe and Okyrhoe, of speed and mobility; Petraia of the rocks, Calypso of the sheltering cave, Prymno of the ship's stern. The rest of the Oceanids were also sea-goddesses. Oceanid Doris, Nereus's wife, is mother by him of the 50 Nereids.
As part of their reverie on the ocean, Greek poets named each Nereid: names such as Glauke, "the sea-green"; Cymothoe "the wave-swift"; Lysianassa, "the redeeming mistress"; Menippe, "the courageous mare." Amphitrite, whose hand in marriage conferred sea-sovereignty on Poseidon, is called both a Nereid and an Oceanid.
Another Nereid was Thetis, also called Tethys, a mermaid and clearly an avatar of her grandmother. She had an oracular shrine among the Etruscans, and as Robert Graves notes in The Greek Myths she comforted the smith-god Hephaistos when his mother Hera threw him off Olympus. Zeus considered marrying Thetis, but an oracle said she would bear a son greater than his father. So Thetis married the mortal Peleus and gave birth to Achilles, hero of the Trojan war, but not before showing her sea-nature. When Peleus captured her, she went through a metamorphosis like those of her father and uncle. The Thessalians worshiped her son Achilles as "Ruler of the Black Sea," according to Burkert.
Kerényi calls Amphitrite and Thetis two names or aspects of the original mistress of the foaming, storming waves. By Poseidon, Amphitrite had many children, the most visible in myth the island-goddess Rhodos, of Rhodes, and horn-bearing Triton, described by Kerényi as a satyr of the sea, rapist of young women and men.
Phorkys, Amphitrite's uncle, likewise had a brood of sea-children by his wife Keto, "Sea Monster," including the half-woman, half-serpent Echidne. Echidne married the half-serpent Typhon; Graves notes Typhon was also named as husband of Delphyne, the dragon Apollo conquered at Delphi.
Sea-ruling, however, did not fall all in one family. Rhea's consorts the Telchines, who had their own oceanic aspects, had a sea-goddess sister Halia. Her sons by Poseidon, driven mad, raped her. In response, she threw herself into the sea, becoming Leukothea, the white mermaid goddess who lent the sailor Odysseus her veil to avoid shipwreck. Boetians worshiped a sea-god Glaukos, son of Cretan Minos and Pasiphae.
Lovely Aphrodite, the foam-born, mistress of several islands, also had obvious connections to the sea. She shared titles with sea-goddesses, particularly the Oceanids, such as Peitho, "persuasion." She conducted her first love affair beneath the waves, with Nereus's son Nerites, who mated with her in cockle-form. One myth engendered Aphrodite from the contact of sea-water with the severed genitals of Uranus; another gave her for mother the goddess Euonyme, consort of Cronos. Kerényi calls Euonyme a corruption of Eurynome, the name of the Oceanid who with Ophion ruled the Titans before Cronos and Rhea, which rulership they lost when their rivals tossed them into the sea. Ophion had a serpent's body and seems another Old One of the Sea, like Phorkys and Nereus. In another creation myth, Eurynome and Ophion made the world. However Aphrodite was born, she was a child of the sea.
In addition to the long list of deities and demideities who overtly ruled and pleasured in the sea, another lengthy list had hidden or unexpected links to ocean. The great dark-moon witch-goddess Hecate had as great-grandfather Pontos "the Sea," Kerényi notes. Her maternal great uncles were Nereus, Phorkys and Thaumas, her maternal great aunt "Sea Monster" Keto. Hecate's first love-affairs were with gods of the sea; she dallied with Triton and bore to Phorkys the sea-monster Scylla, who ate six of Odysseus's men on his long journey home.
Kerényi makes Scylla a doubling of trifold Hecate: "Her twelve feet -- the necessary number for a doubled Hecate -- remained undeveloped. Her six terrible heads are poised upon a long neck. In her mouths the death-dealing teeth are set in three rows." But like most goddess-monsters, Scylla had an earlier, beautiful aspect, as a lovely woman from head to hips, a dog at the hips, a fish below: a fishy Hecate whom Kerényi makes particularly a goddess of the Etruscans.
Hecate's cousin Apollo also had a watery aspect. Apollo's first act as a baby-god was to kill at Delphi the oracular dragon Delphyne and her husband Python or Typhon. Delphyne means "womb" but also "dolphin," a suitable name for a fish-squirming dragon. Along with the slain dragon's oracle, Apollo took her name and thereafter was Delphic Apollo -- in one translation, Apollo the dolphin. Perhaps the Poseidon said to have ruled Delphi was a sea-aspect of Apollo.
A dolphin at times also carried love-god Eros, who then wielded a cuttlefish, a kind of octopus. Dionysos likewise rode a dolphin. The wine-god spent significant time at sea while fleeing his jealous stepmother Hera.
The man-eating winged Harpies who harried Odysseus were daughters of sea-god Thaumas, also father of the rainbow-messenger Iris. The inimitable singers the Sirens were daughters of Phorkys, Thaumas's brother.
The Graiai, the grey goddesses who shared a single eye in the myth of Perseus, were also daughters of Phorkys, as were the Gorgons whom Perseus pursued: Stheno, "strength," Euryale, "the wide sea," and Medusa "ruleress," in Kerényi's translation. Kerényi notes that the masculine form of the last, Medousa, was often applied to the sea's ruler, whether Phorkys or Poseidon. Poseidon ravished the female Medusa, sending her to the underworld in what Kerényi calls a possible sea-version of the myth of Persephone and Hades.
Thus, casting through Greek myth, we find Poseidon, Amphitrite, Thetis, Nereus, 50 Nereids, dozens of Oceanids, hundreds of other sea goddesses, gods and nymphs and many deities with links hidden or unhidden to the sea: Aphrodite, Hecate, Apollo, Eros, Dionysos, others. The ancient Greeks were lapped and enfolded in the ocean, and to it they returned a singular, all-encompassing devotion. Perhaps they inherited this from their forebears, the Cretans and the Cycladic Islanders. Certainly the sea-goddesses and gods had rivals in importance. But before everything, in Greek mythology, lay the sea and the ocean, whether Tethys and Oceanus or Eurynome and serpent-bodied Ophion. And all through Greek myth, the mighty and wise sea-goddess and her shape-changing mate reared their heads: Amphitrite and Poseidon, Aphrodite and Nerites, Hecate and Phorkys.
At the edge of Sounion Head, the muscular white-columned temple behind us, we broke fast with bread, kalamata olives, furry green beans, feta cheese and young red wine. We sat encircled in sky and sea, kicking our feet over a limitless ocean. The water went on and on, deep blue, cupping and holding up a group of brown islands. Farther on, in a blue haze, the sea met the sky, completing at the world's edge the blue globe around us. The sea completed and ruled us, filled to brimming with goddesses and gods.
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