Poseidon
Poseidon is one of the three brother gods in Greek mythology who divided the world among themselves. Poseidon's lot was the sea. As sea god Poseidon is usually seen with a trident. He is the god of water, horses, and earthquakes and was considered responsible for shipwrecks and drownings.
The symbol for which Poseidon is best known is the trident. Poseidon is often shown alongside his wife Amphitrite in a sea chariot drawn by sea creatures. Poseidon was the sea god who could cause all manner of trouble on the sea; when on earth he caused earthquakes. He was also god of horses.
Poseidon asserts equality with Zeus in the Iliad, but then defers to Zeus as king. By some accounts Poseidon is older than Zeus and the one sibling Zeus didn't have to rescue from his father (the power leverage Zeus usually used with his siblings). Even with Odysseus, who had ruined his son Polyphemus' life, Poseidon behaved in a less fearsome manner than might be expected of an enraged Sturm und Drang kind of god. In the challenge for patronage of the polis of Athens, Poseidon lost to his niece Athena, but then worked cooperatively with her -- as in the Trojan War where they try to thwart Zeus with Hera's help.
Poseidon may have had an equal claim to the title of king of the gods, but Zeus is the one who took it. When the Titans made the thunderbolt for Zeus, they made the trident for Poseidon. These objects are symbols of their power and it is sometimes unclear which object and which god is depicted since a trident looks substantially different from a scepter only at the three-pronged fork end.
The trident should not be confused with Triton, the fish-man son of Poseidon and Amphitrite.
Amphitrite
In ancient Greek mythology, Amphitrite (Ἀμφιτρίτη) was a sea-goddess and wife of Poseidon.[1] Under the influence of the Olympian pantheon, she became merely the consort of Poseidon, and was further diminished by poets to a symbolic representation of the sea. In Roman mythology, the consort of Neptune, a comparatively minor figure, was Salacia, the goddess of saltwater
Though Amphitrite does not figure in Greek cultus, at an archaic stage she was of outstanding importance, for in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, she appears at the birthing of Apollo among "all the chiefest of the goddesses, Dione and Rhea and Ichnaea and Themis and loud-moaning Amphitrite." Theseus in the submarine halls of his father Poseidon saw the daughters of Nereus dancing with liquid feet, and "august, ox-eyed Amphitrite", who wreathed him with her wedding wreath, according to a fragment of Bacchylides. Jane Ellen Harrison recognized in the poetic treatment an authentic echo of Amphitrite's early importance: "It would have been much simpler for Poseidon to recognize his own son... the myth belongs to that early stratum of mythology when Poseidon was not yet god of the sea, or, at least, no-wise supreme there—Amphitrite and the Nereids ruled there, with their servants the Tritons. Even so late as the Iliad Amphitrite is not yet 'Neptuni uxor'" [Neptune's wife]".[9]
"Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite", detail of a vast Roman mosaic from Cirta, now in the Louvre (ca. 315–325 AD).
Amphitrite, "the third one who encircles [the sea]"[10], was so entirely confined in her authority to the sea and the creatures in it that she was almost never associated with her husband, either for purposes of worship or in works of art, except when he was to be distinctly regarded as the god who controlled the sea. An exception may be the cult image of Amphitrite that Pausanias saw in the temple of Poseidon at the Isthmus of Corinth (ii.1.7).
The widely respected Pindar, in his sixth Olympian Ode, recognized Poseidon's role as "great god of the sea, husband of Amphitrite, goddess of the golden spindle." For later poets, Amphitrite became simply a metaphor for the sea: Euripides, in Cyclops (702) and Ovid, Metamorphoses, (i.14).
Eustathius said that Poseidon first saw her dancing at Naxos among the other Nereids,[11] and carried her off.[12] But in another version of the myth, she fled from his advances to Atlas,[13] at the farthest ends of the sea; there the dolphin of Poseidon sought her through the islands of the sea, and finding her, spoke persuasively on behalf of Poseidon, if we may believe Hyginus[14] and was rewarded by being placed among the stars as the constellation Delphinus.[15]
Neptune and Amphitrite by 16th-century Dutch artist Jacob de Gheyn II
In the arts of vase-painting and mosaic, Amphitrite was distinguishable from the other Nereids only by her queenly attributes. In works of art, both ancient ones and post-Renaissance paintings, Amphitrite is represented either enthroned beside Poseidon or driving with him in a chariot drawn by sea-horses (hippocamps) or other fabulous creatures of the deep, and attended by Tritons and Nereids. She is dressed in queenly robes and has nets in her hair. The pincers of a crab are sometimes shown attached to her temples.
