THE DWELLERS IN THE WATERS. 205 gives him a place of refuge; and if she is married to a mortal, it is because she will not be the bride of Zeus, or, as in another version, because her child was to be mightier than his father; in other words, to belong to the class of Fatal Children. In a third version she wins Peleus as a husband, by promising that his son shall be the most renowned of all heroes, and she acts rather as a dawn-goddess than as a Nereid, when in the Iliad she preserves the body of Patroklos from decay. It is, in truth, difficult to draw any sharp line of distinction between the dwellers in the water and the inhabitants of the air. The sun each day rises from the ocean, The kinsfolk of and sinks into it again. Aphroditê is born from Triton. the sea foam; Athênê at her birth is Tritogeneia;1 and Daphne in like manner is the child of the Peneian stream. From this point of view they may all be regarded as children of Tritos, Triton, the lord of the waters, and the kinsfolk of Amphitrite. The latter in some traditions is the wife of Poseidon; in the Odyssey she is simply the purple-faced, loud-sounding sea.2 To the waste of waters belong also the Seirens, whose doom was that they should live only until some one should escape their toils; and they are thus brought to their end, in one version of the myth, by Odysseus, in another by Orpheus. But apart from the one characteristic of their beautiful and witching song, the mythology of these beings, if so it may be called, is thoroughly artificial. In form half fishes and half women, they are akin to Echidna, Melusina, and other like beings of ancient and modern story. Skylla and The Seirens are the witches of the shoals. The demons of the whirlpools are Skylla and Charybdis, who, in the Odyssey, are placed on the rocks, distant about an arrow's flight from each other, between which the ship of the wanderer must pass. If he goes one he will lose six of his men as a prey to the six mouths Charybdis. near the 3 See p. 191. which Skylla will open to devour them; but this will be a less evil than to have his ships knocked to pieces in the whirlpool of Charybdis, which thrice in the day drinks in the waters of the sea, and thrice spouts them forth again. Skylla, in short, as her name denotes, is one who tears her prey; while Charybdis' swallows them. We find in Megarian tradition another Skylla, who gives her love to the Cretan Minos, and betrays the city to him by stealing from the head of her father Nisos the purple lock on which the safety of the place depends. Her treachery brings her no good. According to one tradition she is drowned in the Saronic gulf; in another she throws herself into the water, and is turned into a bird, after which her father, in the form of an eagle, swoops down into the sea. The name Over all these inhabitants of the world of waters Poseidon is, in the later mythology, the supreme king. But there are grave reasons for thinking that neither Poseidon. the conception nor the name of this deity is Hellenic or even Aryan. Although the Greeks, like other Aryan tribes, have a character which markedly distinguishes them from tribes or nations belonging to other races of mankind, they were, nevertheless, brought into contact with many non-Aryan tribes or nations. The Greek lived almost more on the sea than on land, and his commerce took him especially to Egypt and the coasts of Palestine and Lesser Asia. But the natives of some of the countries thus visited were as completely children of the sea as the Greeks; and the greatness of the Phenicians as mariners, navigators, and colonists, dates from an earlier time than that of the Greeks. It would, therefore, be wonderful indeed if the intercourse between them had effects upon one side only, and if not a trace were found in Hellenic lands of Syrian or Egyptian or Phenician influence. Such traces, however, 1 The word belongs to the same group with Charon, Xáoμa; Eng. gape, yawn, &c. 2 For the stories relating to the death of these beings, see Myth. of Ar. Nat. ii. 261. NAME AND IDEA OF POSEIDON. 207 are manifest, and they are not now disputed by anyone. The Greek alphabet is unquestionably Semitic, and Semitic words and names are found in Greek dialects and Greek mythology. The Boeotian Kadmos (Cadmus) is the man who comes from Kedem, the East; and it is in the land in which he is said to have made his abode that the Phenician influence is most clearly seen. It is here that we find in the mythical Athamas and Melikertes a reproduction of the Semitic Tammuz and Melkarth. When, then, we have a name which we cannot explain by a comparison with any Greek words, and for which we find no equivalent in the language or the traditions of cognate tribes-when the character of the person named is not self-consistent-when the stories told of him point to disputes and struggles for the establishment of his power, and when, lastly, these traditions seem to indicate the East as the birthplace of his worship, then we are at the least free to see what may be said for and against the notion that the god in question is not a Greek or an Aryan, but a Semitic deity. Such a name is that of the so-called sea-god Poseidon. It cannot be explained by referring it to any Greek words; and the attempts to connect it with Potamos and Posis are failures, because, beyond doubt, Poseidon was not, as this would show him to be, a god of fresh-water streams and rivers.1 Nor can it with sufficient reason be connected with the root which gives us such words as Potis, Potnia, Potent, and others denoting power. Poseidon, Hêrê, and According to the Greek story, he was a son of Kronos and Rhea, and therefore a brother of Zeus and Hades; and we have already seen that when the three brothers cast lots for the sovereignty of the heavens, the sea, and the regions beneath the earth, that of the sea fell to the share of Poseidon, who received a trident as the emblem of his power. But Poseidon never became the 1 Preller, Griechische Mythologie, i. 443, tries to establish this connexion by means of the dialectical varieties Ποτίδας, Ποτείδας. god of the sea in the sense in which Helios is the sun, and Selênê is the moon. It is true that he has under his control the forces which affect its movements; but his abode is not within its waters. The true sea-god, as we have seen, is Nereus. With Poseidon it looks much as though his relation to the sea was an after-thought, or as though it was suggested by the fact that his worship had been introduced from a foreign land. He belongs, indeed, much more to the earth than to the waters. Thus he is Gaieochos, the keeper or guardian of the world, and Enosichthon, the earthshaker. He also disputes with Hêrê, Helios, and Athênê the sovereignty of certain Greek cities, not all of which are on the sea-coast, while some are not even near it. The most signal of these contests was for the naming of Athens, which he wished, it is said, to call Poseidonia. In the council of the gods, who were summoned to settle the quarrel, Zeus decided that it should be named after the deity who should confer the best gift on mankind. Upon this Athênê produced the olive tree, and Poseidon the horse; and the victory was adjudged to the former, the olive being an emblem of peace and prosperity, and the horse a sign of war and wretchedness. Poseidon into Hellas. Poseidon is thus immediately connected with the horse; and the reasons for this connexion are certainly not Introduction of apparent at the first glance. But even of this the worship of fact there are different accounts; for others maintained that Poseidon created the horse in Thessaly, while others again affirmed that the gift which he produced in his strife with Athênê was not a horse, but a fountain which he opened by a stroke of his trident on the hill of the Akropolis. Throughout Greece, indeed, it would seem that the efforts to establish his supremacy were met with a very strong resistance. He is said to have dried up the rivers when Hêrê refused to let him be king in Argos. In Corinth there was a compromise, by which Helios remained master of the POSEIDON THE BONDMAN. 209 Akropolis, while Poseidon was acknowledged as lord of the isthmus. In Delos and at Delphi he failed to carry his point, and he was content to give up his rights over the former in exchange for a temple on the island of Kalaureia, and over the latter for a sanctuary on the Cape of Tainaron. At Naxos he was defeated by Dionysos; but in Aigina (Egina) he was victorious over Zeus himself. In the Iliad we have further a very singular story, which tells us that he plotted with Hêrê and Athênê to put Zeus in chains, and that he was outwitted by Thetis, at whose warning the king of Olympos placed the hundred-handed Briareos by his throne to scare the conspirators. At last these quarrels were ended, and Poseidon took his place among the Hellenic gods as one of the three Kronid brothers. Henceforth his dwelling was especially at Aigai (Æga), where in his splendid palace he kept the gold-maned horses which bore his chariot over the waters. But the difference between himself and Zeus was sufficiently marked. Although he tells Hêrê that his power united with hers could match that of the father of gods and men, he is unable to withstand him alone. He is also compelled, as are Apollo and Herakles, to do the work of a bondman. With Phoebus he is made to build the walls of Ilion for Laomedon. When the task is done, Laomedon refuses to give him the covenanted recompense; and hence Poseidon, we are told, took the side of Agamemnon and Menelaos, when they came to Troy to avenge themselves on Paris. horse and Poseidon thus seems, to be pre-eminently a builder, who, it would seem is therefore called Asphaliaios, and who is, for whatever reason, especially connected not with Poseidon, the ships only, but with the horse and the bull.' The the bull. same Phenician word, it is said, signifies both bull and ship; and so the fact that his worship was brought into Hellas by men who came in ships might lead to the See the story of the bull in the form of the Minotaur, p. 105, and of the monster which ravages the fields of Marathon. Р |