Athenian Poseidon

Athens and Trozen shared a myth according to which Athena and Poseidon disputed ownership of the land.28 In the lore of cities bordering the Saronic Gulf, Poseidon figures in a number of these contests; tellingly, he is never the winner. At Trozen, the contest ended in a truce under which the territory was shared, while at Athens, the story went that the victorious Athena produced an olive tree on the Akropolis as a token of her claim, while Poseidon struck the rock with his trident, creating a “sea.” The nature of this sea is unclear, though Pausanias (1.26.5) describes it as a well with salt water, enclosed within the walls of the Classical Erechtheion. He also notes an altar on which sacrifices to both Poseidon and Erechtheus were made. The story of the conflict between Poseidon and Athena seems to be closely related to that of the early war between Athens and Eleusis, in which the earth-born Athenian king Erechtheus, protege of Athena, battled Eumolpos, the Eleusinian leader and son of Poseidon. Athens was victorious when Erechtheus sacrificed his daughters to save the city, but he himself was struck by Poseidon’s trident and hidden under the earth.29 By the fifth century, Poseidon had taken the name of his antagonist as a cult epithet, an arrangement comparable to that between Apollo and Hyakinthos at Amyklai. In both cases the cults of Olympian gods were superimposed on those of earlier indigenous deities, and the earlier figures were transformed into heroes killed by the gods and worshiped side by side with them.30

Poseidon was an important deity in Archaic Eleusis, consistent with his usual close cult relations to Demeter. Eleusis possessed a cult of Poseidon Pater (Father), and a priest of the Kerykes served Poseidon Prosbaterios (of the Approaches) and Themeliouchos (Upholding the Foundations). It is likely that all these epithets have to do with Poseidon’s role vis-a-vis Demeter as a fructifying deity of water and flooding. That Poseidon’s role in Athenian cult has much to do with the relations between Athens and Eleusis is likewise demonstrated in the festival known as the Skira, when the Athenian priests of Poseidon, Athena, and Helios walked to a sanctuary near the boundary with Eleusis.31

Poseidon had other cults in Attica, but the most important was at the promontory of Sounion, where a temple was added c. 490 and rebuilt under Perikles. The Athenians held a quadrennial festival with boat races, and the vigor of the Archaic cult is attested by at least twelve kouroi (statues of idealized young men) found buried in a pit east of the temple.32 The earliest cult at Sounion, however, probably belonged to the hero Phrontis, the steersman of Menelaos buried there according to Homer (Od. 3.276-85). In spite of the apparent antiquity of his cult, Poseidon was not a significant presence in Attica compared with Zeus, Demeter, Apollo, Dionysos, and of course Athena.