Poseidon
God of the Sea
puh-SY-dun
Earth-shaker and lord of the sea, who took the waters when the world was divided and never stopped resenting the split.
The Story
Poseidon drew the sea in the lots cast between the three brothers, and the ocean's temperament is his: calm to placid one hour, ruinous the next. He is also the earth-shaker, which in an earthquake country made him a god you appeased rather than admired.
He competes and he holds grudges. He lost Athens to Athena and Argos to Hera, and when Odysseus blinded his son Polyphemus he kept the man off his own island for ten years. Horses are his too, he struck a rock and the first one sprang out.
Did You Know?
- Linear B tablets from Bronze Age Pylos record more offerings to Poseidon than to Zeus. Before the Olympian order settled, he appears to have been the senior god.
- Worshippers drowned horses in springs and the sea for him, one of the few Greek sacrifices that was not eaten afterwards.
- In one version he is not swallowed with his siblings at all: Rhea hid him among a flock of lambs and told Cronus she had given birth to a foal.