Antiquities Exhibits

This morning while browsing artifacts in the collections of the Getty Villa, I came across this exquisite gilded silver sculpture of a Triton forming the handle of an oinochoe.  As I described in a post a couple of years ago, the original sea god, Triton, was the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite according to Hesiod's Theogony. Triton is usually represented as a merman, with the upper body of a human and the tailed lower body of a fish. At some time during the Greek and Roman era, Tritons became a generic term for mermen in art and literature. A female version (tritoness) was eventually introduced as well. Triton was said to dwell with his parents in  a golden palace claimed to be located at Aegae on the island of Euboea in a passage from book 5 of Homer's Iliad. It describes how  Poseidon "lashed his long-maned horses and drove to Aegae, where he had his famous palace" after having destroyed Odysseus' raft with a storm. Later in Book 13 of the Iliad, Poseidon "...

Some scholars argue that Indo-European people, having no direct knowledge of the sea as they originated from inland areas, reused the theology of a deity originally either chthonic or wielding power over inland freshwaters for the god of the sea as contact was made with seafaring peoples. They then paired him with Salacia, the goddess of saltwater who subsequently came to represent the virile force of Neptune.  This conclusion was arrived at by the numerous findings of inscriptions mentioning Neptune in the proximity of such locations. Servius the grammarian also explicitly identified Neptune as the deity in charge of all the rivers, springs, and waters. Before the 1st century BCE, the Romans thanked the god Portunus or Fortunus for naval victories, but Neptune supplanted him in this role by at least the first century BCE when Sextus Pompeius, younger son of Pompey Magnus, called himself "son of Neptune."  Like Poseidon, Neptune was also worshipped by the Romans as a god of h...

In pre-Olympian Bronze Age Greece, Poseidon was venerated as a chief deity at Pylos and Thebes. He had also the cult title "earth shaker". In the myths of isolated Arcadia he is related with Demeter and Persephone and he was venerated as a horse, however it seems that he was originally a god of the waters. He is often regarded as the tamer or father of horses, and he could create springs with a strike of his trident.  Homer and Hesiod suggest that Poseidon became lord of the sea following the defeat of his father Cronus, when the world was divided by lot among his three sons: Zeus was given the sky, Hades the underworld, and Poseidon the sea, with the Earth and Mount Olympus belonging to all three. In Homer's Iliad, Poseidon supports the Greeks against the Trojans during the Trojan War and in the Odyssey, during the sea-voyage from Troy back home to Ithaca, the Greek hero Odysseus provokes Poseidon's fury by blinding his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, resulting in Posei...

This sculpture of a self-crowning athlete may have been offered in gratitude by an athlete following a victory.  It shows a young man placing an olive wreath on his head, a symbol of victory, but also a symbol of citizenship.  The "self-crowning athlete" came to represent democracy in ancient Athens where the right to self-rule could be earned through citizenship.   The relief was found at Sounion, within the territory of the Leontis tribe.  The earliest literary reference to Sounion is in Homer's Odyssey (III. 278–285). The story recounts that as the various Greek commanders sailed back from Troy, the helmsman of the ship of King Menelaus of Sparta died at his post while rounding "Holy Sounion, Cape of Athens." Menelaus then landed at Sounion to give his companion full funeral honors with a cremation on a funeral pyre on the beach.  Sounion was fortified in the nineteenth year of the Peloponnesian War (413 BCE) for the purpose of protecting the passage of ...

Samian ware flask from Southern Gaul, 1st century CE, depicting Heracles killing Laomedon, King of Troy, at the Museo Civico Archeologico della Valle Sabbia in Gavardo (Brescia). In one version of mythology, Laomedon, king of Troy, was the father of Ganymede. Zeus fell in love with the beautiful boy and, disguised as an eagle, kidnapped the child. Laomedon grieved so much for his son Zeus sent Hermes to Laomedon with two magn ificent horses so swift they could run across water. Hermes also assured the king that Ganymede would become immortal and would thereafter be the distinguished cup bearer for the gods. Sometime later, Laomedon began constructing walls around his city of Troy and promised a reward to Apollo and Poseidon for their assistance. But after the walls were completed Laomedon refused to give them the promised payment. So the gods, in their anger, sent a pestilence and a sea monster to ravage the land. An oracle revealed to Laomedon that the only way to save Troy would ...