Amphitrite

Amphitrite was a sea goddess, one of the Nereids, and the wife of Poseidon. She was the mother of Triton, the merman who rises from the deep. Early poets sometimes used her name for the sea itself, and in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo she is counted among the goddesses who attended the birth of Apollo on Delos.

Family

Hesiod includes Amphitrite among the fifty daughters of Nereus and Doris, the daughter of Oceanus (Theogony 243), and Apollodorus repeats this in his list of the Nereids (Library 1.2.7). In another passage, however, Apollodorus counts her among the Oceanids, the daughters of Oceanus and Tethys (1.2.2), and when he records the marriage he calls her “Amphitrite, daughter of Ocean” (1.4.5). Hesiod’s Theogony tells that Poseidon and Amphitrite had a son, “great, wide-ruling Triton” (930–933). Apollodorus names Triton and a daughter, Rhode, as their children (1.4.5), and elsewhere mentions another daughter, Benthesicyme, to whom Poseidon entrusted his son Eumolpus in Ethiopia (3.15.4).

Hesiod adds that Triton lives in the depths of the sea in a golden house beside his mother and his father, the lord of the sea. Rhode, in Apollodorus’ account, became the wife of Helios.

Her Roman counterpart was Salacia.

Worship

Amphitrite had no cult of her own, but she stood beside Poseidon in his sanctuaries. In the temple of Poseidon at the Isthmus of Corinth Pausanias saw her image in the fore-temple and, on the great chariot group inside, Amphitrite and Poseidon standing in the car with the boy Palaemon on a dolphin (2.1.7–8). She appeared with Poseidon in relief on the altar of Hyacinthus at Amyclae (3.19.3), among the offerings of Micythus at Olympia (5.26.2) and on the base of the throne of Zeus there (5.11.8).

In Homer and the Hymns

In the Odyssey Amphitrite is mostly an image of the sea. Circe speaks of the great wave of “dark-eyed Amphitrite” roaring against the Wandering Rocks (12.60) and of the countless creatures that “loud-moaning Amphitrite” rears in the waters near Scylla (12.97); elsewhere the poet speaks of her monsters and her waves in the same way (3.91, 5.422). This usage shows how close the goddess and the water were in the minds of early poets.

In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (lines 93–94), when Leto is in labour on Delos, the goddesses Dione, Rhea, Themis and “loud-moaning Amphitrite” are present at the birth. Here she is a figure of real standing among the immortals.

The Marriage to Poseidon

The oldest sources simply say that Poseidon married her; Bacchylides calls the wreath she gave Theseus a gift from Aphrodite “at her marriage” (17.112–116). A later account of the wooing is preserved in the Astronomica attributed to Hyginus (2.17), who says he takes it from Eratosthenes. In it Amphitrite, wishing to keep her virginity, is unwilling to marry Poseidon and flees to Atlas. Poseidon sends out many searchers, among them a dolphin, who roams the islands, finds her, persuades her to marry the god and himself arranges the wedding. As a reward, Poseidon placed the dolphin among the stars as the constellation Delphinus, and Hyginus adds that this is why statues of Poseidon show a dolphin in his hand or under his foot. Oppian adds that the dolphin led her, still unwilling, to the god’s bed, and that Poseidon honoured dolphins ever after (Halieutica 1.383–392).

Amphitrite and Theseus

Amphitrite also appears in the story of Theseus and Minos. According to the tradition that Pausanias reports (1.17.3), when Minos threw a ring into the sea and challenged Theseus to bring it back, Theseus dived and recovered it, and Amphitrite gave him a golden crown. In Bacchylides (Dithyramb 17.97–129) he is received in the halls of Poseidon by the dancing Nereids and by “holy, ox-eyed Amphitrite”, the dear wife of his father, who throws a purple cloak around him and sets on his curly hair a wreath dark with roses that Aphrodite had given her at her marriage; he returns to the ship unwetted by the sea.

See Also: Nereids, Nereus, Doris, Poseidon, Triton, Theseus, Minos, Oceanus