Liv speaks with Dr. Ryan Denson about the mythology of the sea (again!), this time about the Nereid nymphs, daughters of the Old Man of the Sea, and Triton(s), the son(s) of Poseidon (sometimes there's one, sometimes many... such is Greek myth). Follow Ryan on Twitter. Help keep LTAMB going by subscribing to Liv's Patreon for bonus content!
CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.
Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.
Hi, Hello, Nice to have you here. This is let's talk about Met's baby, and I am liv that woman who is obsessed with the sea and everything within its depths, even if such obsession only comes out in very specific circumstances like conversations with this particular guest. Last year, newly doctor Ryan Denson joined me to talk about the sea monsters of Greek mythology, and yes, I turned it into a lengthy conversation. But whales and sharks and what implication those creatures have on ancient Greece in its mythology, because frankly, I could talk about sharks forever, and I live on an island in the Pacific Northwest that is deeply and completely obsessed with wales. So niches colliding here and today Ryan is back to talk about some of the deities of the sea within Greek myth particularly Triton or sometimes plural Tritons, and the Nareids, those nymphs of the sea, daughters of Nareus. Just a quick note, though, we did have some fascinating and wild tech difficulties when we first tried to record this, which meant that the recording basically just like kept cutting out at three minutes. We gave up after like ten, so it's smooth after the first bits, but I didn't want to lose everything that we were chatting about during those issues. So anyway, if you notice some like weird transitions or seemingly awkward replies that don't fit on either part, that's why. But again it doesn't last. And then we had like a nice chat that we rescheduled for the week later. Just like last time, this conversation was so much fun and again devolved into me talking about my obsession with the sea, because but the sea is very cool. Needless to say, I didn't need any convincing when Ryan asked if I wanted to have a chat about these particular types of deities. Plus, this conversation is what inspired the recent episode I did on the most important and famous of the Nariids, none other than Thetis herself. Gods, she was cooler than I thought, and we all have this episode to thank for now knowing that conversations, it's better down where it's wetter. Deities of the sea with doctor Ryan Denson, it was so fun having you want to talk about sea monsters. That episode is still one of those ones where I think back and I'm like, I think back, and I think I didn't let you talk enough because I was so excited to talk about like sharks in ancient Greek.
It's a good perspective too, and I mean I think I might have told you in the email afterwards too that I mean it really helped me too to think about some of the because I think, like I said in that podcast, I mean there's no real direct word in ancient Greek or Latin for sharks. It kind of gets lost amidst all the sea monster stuff as well. But I mean, if you really look, there are probably some references to sharks, and that really got me thinking about a lot of stuff and sort of the sea dogs stuff as well, which that is hopefully going to be some of that. It's going to be in an article soon. Hopefully we'll see if it actually gets accepted. But yeah, I mean that was great. I love the shark conversations.
And all good. I'm glad because I, oh my god, I was like just I was so keen on every kind of speculation I could make about shause I am deeply obsessed. So it was very fun. So I mean, happy to like talk more ocean based mythological creatures in this case much more mythological. But yeah, I mean I want to hear kind of any everything. But I was just looking back on the email when you propose this idea, and it has always really fascinated me that there are so many instances of like explicitly half man half fish characters in Greek myth But yeah, there are there are no like explicit like mermaids. There's not women, like there's you know, oceanids and stuff, but we don't know that they necessarily looked like what we think of as mermaids.
So yeah, so I mean that's that's a great observation, and that's actually basically how I start the sort of see people part of my thesis that we do have in terms of you know, anthropomorphic figures in the sea. You know, basically all the sea gods to some extent or Humean one way or the other, Poseidon, you know, Proteus, Glaucus and all that, they all have some human form, at least partially. But in terms of the main figures that I look at are really the tritons and the nyroids, And as you've already said, you know, we have this very interesting gender dichotomy between those two, whereas Tritton's and possibly I mean, we can get into it a bit later too, of Tritton exists as a singular god but also a pluralized merman figure as well, and those are often, I mean very much essentially just murhman figures. The classic definition of what you would call a murr person or a you know, half man half fish person. They're very prominent, especially in Hellenistic in Roman art. They're essentially everywhere. I mean, we have references I think in Cicero's letters to Atticus that he may have had, you know, essentially tritten fountains in his home and things like that, and I believe there's another reference to Pompey's house having things like this. So they're very prominent in mosaics and just visual and material culture. Whereas you don't really see mermaids, you know, we have the nyroids, which are always fully anthropomorphic. They have no you know, in some sense, it would make it would make a better pairing to have these sort of murder people be mermaids and murmen, but we see always the Nyrods just remain fully anthropomorphic. There there's to the best of my knowledge, only one reference in all of Greco Roman antiquity to nyrids is having scales or something like that, and that's in plenty the Elders naturally history where he has this. It's a very strange reference too, and there's all sorts of reasons it's exceptional, but he recalls that there's a report from you know, the governor of Gaull that some Nyrids and Trittan's washed up on the seashore of you know, gaul essentially southern France, and it's reported that they had scales on them, which is again a very unique reference, and it's taken in later medieval and modern history that these are mermaids. But that's, to the best of my knowledge, again, only the only reference in all of ancient literature ancient art where the nyroids have scales. Everywhere else it's completely anthropomorphic, you see, I mean, you know, just everywhere in ancient art that they're they're depicted with completely human bodies as well, even some characters, you know, you have very she's very mermaid like in a sense. If you remember book five of the Odyssey, we have the figure of Ino Lucothea, who she comes up out of the water. And I say she's very Nyrid like as well, because she performs this function that the Nyrods are often described to is helping sailors. She helps Odysseus when he's you know, caught up in the storm.
So she's really interesting in the Odyssey too. I don't know, I forget how much of her background is mentioned in the Odyssey, but I talked about her in fairly recent episode. Because you know, she's was of the House of Thebes and transformed into Lucathea, like she's I know, and then she's Lukeathea afterwards, like after it's almost a curse that she's like tossed into this and then transformed into this goddess. So she's almost kind of unique in that respect too, and and like quite different from the Nreids because the Nreids are you know, the daughters of Narus and they are always sea gods. Yeah, it's quite interesting. And what you're saying about Triton too, he's really fascinating. Like like you said, you know, there's there's like singular Triton and then there's multiple but he's like the son of Poseidon and Patridi, who Ampatradi is also anthropomorphic, and Poseidon is anthropomorphic, and then we just get Triton as their child, being like half fish, and he's also like really violent and weird and he's always interested me. But also there's like minimal sourcing on details.
Yeah, I mean, yeah exactly. I mean in terms of yeah, the Ano Luco thea thing. It's it's very interesting that, you know, she falls into the sea and she's transformed into a sea goddess, but that transformation doesn't really you know, necessitate any physical transformation. It's just fully human. When I mean, at least from our very modern perspective, you would think it makes more sense to give her a fishtail or something as a physical sign of that transformation. But no, I mean, we know in the in the Odyssey specifically, she's described as Inno of the beautiful Ankles, so we know specifically, at least from that passing reference, she presumably is fully human. Yeah, exactly, which is is is very interesting again, I mean why they always do that too, and it's it's very interesting to think too. I mean, the you know, we do have references that the Greeks and Romans were somewhat aware of the the idea of a mermaid from it from near Eastern art. From this goddess art a goddess which is is, you know, basically depicted as what we would now call a mermaid. We have much not in terms of Homer's time, but in much later references. Lucian describes the form of this goddess and it's essentially just what we would describe a mermaid as. Now there's no real word in Greek or Latin to describe it, but I mean that is effectively what he's described. We do have another very interesting reference from Pausanius, who he describes I think is it in Arcadia. I believe that he describes there's worshipers who worship this goddess your Nomee, and it's described the idol that they're worshiping is a wooden statue with gold chains. And he again describes what is essentially a mermaid there as well, which is a very interesting reference because jumping all the way back to Homer, we have this goddess your Nomee who and she's just hanging about with Thetis in book eighteen of the Iliad. So you have this interesting pairing there that those two see goddesses. She's never described in the Iliad, so we were just left presuming that she must be fully anthropomorphic like Thetis. But it's interesting how that, you know, connection kind of diverges a little bit, that there may have been some sort of cultic worship of some sort of mermaid goddess, but it doesn't really make its place in the literary sources as much.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that too, because Arcadia is like not even really like on the sea either. I mean, yeah, some coastline.
I guess, yeah, And I mean that's it's a very interesting thing too. I mean, i'm you would have to speak to someone that is, you know, more knowledgeable about the practices that go into creating statues of gods. But the fact that it's made out of specifically a wood statue seems odd to me as well. And I mean, again, we don't want to speculate that there were more than just that one references, but something like a wood statue is obviously going to have decayed and we would have no other evidence of it. Yeah, which is is just is fascinating stuff too.
But when it comes to the wood statues, I think, as far as I understand it. It's was fairly common at like smaller cult worship sites because I think they were probably easier and cheaper, and we just don't think of them as much because they, yeah, like you said, they would decay and so we don't have anything that survives. But I think like Pausanius is a great reference of I think he does mention a lot of things like that because he would be the only one who wrote it down, so that we know. It's just yeah, we're all grateful for Pausanias for that, but exactly, Yeah, that's really interesting. So there is this one mermaid technic kind of mermaid.
Yeah, And I mean, like I said, we have Lucian's description of Arte Go Goddis, and you know, various references to that. I mean, there's a couple others if you look around of descriptions like that. But I mean I can basically count on one hand the number of identifiable references to mermaids in Greco Roman literature. So it's it's interesting that it's a concept that they were aware of, but it doesn't really catch fire in a sense, they weren't interested in incorporating that into their literature like that the way that you see the merman form, you know, with Tritton. There's tons of references to Tritton with fishtail and stuff in literature, and we see too, I mean with Avid Glaucus in the Minimalises book thirteen and fourteen, he's basically given the Trittan mermaid or merman form there. So it's I mean, for whatever reason. And again this is one of those things that I mean, we don't really know why they just weren't interested in mermaids like that part of it. I think it has to do with, I mean, the way that the Nyroids are depicted. They're always meant to be figures of divine beauty and things like that. So if you go back to I mean kind of recalling the other podcasts that we did with the Andromeda myth, the reason that Poseidon sent Aikitus to attack Andromeda in her people was because her mother Cassiopeia claimed that she was more beautiful than the Niroids. So we have that nice, you know, Greek myth trope of you know, when someone claims to be more so and so than a god, well, bad things happen. And in that case, of course, it's it's the beauty of the Niroids that has apparently been offended there, and we have all sorts of other scattered references too. I mean, there's a bit in one of the Greek novels where I mean it basically one of the protagonists of the Greek novels she's basically mistaken for an Irid at one point, or jokingly in a way, because someone claims, Oh, you're so beautiful, you can't surely you can't be a mortal woman, you must be an Irid. So it's it's a sort of you know, and you can imagine people, you know, using that as a term of flattery and stuff. Purpercious has a similar reference to as well. So it might be the way that you know, this sort of mermaid formed. This a you know, half woman, half fish tailed thing is believed to not go along with their ideals of then Irids in the same way that we get sort of like monstrous ideals of Scylla as being in art. She takes on that form of what is essentially a mermaid, plus that she has the dogs stretching out of her waist as well.
Oh yeah, we were talking about I'm gonna try to do this as if like we haven't had like a different recordings, but one thing, and I hope this doesn't interrupt where you were at the last thing. But one thing that I always think about too is Narius and Proteus and all these people because there's such a tradition of like not only half fish people, but half fish people men specifically half fish men. Let's jump right back into this reattempt.
Yeah, so, I mean, I think at least too, I think what some of what I was saying last time is that, yeah, it's not it's one of those things that like no one has a definitive answer to, and I don't think anyone ever will come up with a definitive answer as well. It's just certain things. You know, we were talking a bit before about how I mean you have both of these in basically Near Eastern Art, Merman and mermaids. Essentially you have these various forms of different goddess is like at a goddess Atagiaitis, I can never say that name probably weird d Yeah, and a similar thing with I mean, we just have Murhman in near Eastern Art, and we know that the Greek and Romans were familiar with these, but one of them seems to become more popular than the other. And it's always a thing when you have cross cultural interactions like that, some ideas really pick up and some just don't. Just you know, it just doesn't stick as well in some cultures. And so I mean, we can only really speculate why this is. I mean, to me, one of the reasons, you know, we can imagine a sort of alternate version of Greco Roman antiquity where the Nyroids, you know, sort of become mermaids or something like that. But the reason that they don't, I think a lot of times has to do with the fact that they're so strongly encapsulated with the ideas of like divine beauty and this sort of like divine idealization of beauty in terms of, you know, the fact that if they're so strongly meant to be beautiful figures, and we've talked about with the Andromeda myth and all of that, does that then imply sort of physical perfection. So something like that seems to require that they're you know, fully anthropomorphic, if you want to look at it that way. So things like scales and a fish tail might in a way compromise that sort of idealization like that that they always have to be depicted in certain ways. So is that maybe one reason why mermaids don't catch on as much, that the sort of like feminine equivalent to see people is just always meant to be depicted in a certain way. And then we do have in a way, you know, we keep saying, you know that mermaids don't really catch on, and we're talking about sort of like the classic definition of mermaid is just purely top half woman, bottom half lower or the lower half as a fish. But we do also have an ancient art depictions of Scilla, which she's very different there from her home merit depiction, you know, in Homer in the Odyssey, Circe describes her as this horrific grotesque monster, multi limbed thing. But when we get her in art from the about the fifth century BC onward, she's depicted as sort of like what you could call like a mermaid. Plus essentially she has the top half of a woman, bottom half of akitis or a fish. But then she has these dog protomi sticking out of her waist, so these dog heads sort of jutting out of the side, and that's another indication maybe that you know, when we start talking about mermaids, these sort of mermaid former mermaid like form is meant to be something that's very monstrous in a sense, So something like Scilla becomes associated with a mermaid plus type thing, whereas the Nyroids kind of go the opposite direction there. You know, they are goddesses, They're meant to be depicted a different way.
Yeah, that reminds me of something that came up. I spoke with Natalie Haynes a few weeks ago about her novel Stone Blind, which features Medusa, and one of the things that came up in that conversation is the kind of like a beautification that takes place around that same time that you're talking about Scilla. So it sounds like that's kind of part of it as well. Where in the same way that the Gorgons and Medusa go from being like really monstrous to you know, kind of beautiful women with a couple of snakes here and there and wings, it's like similar with Skilla, where where she is so monstrous and wild and I love her in the Odyssey, she's fascinating, but she goes from that like horrifying thing to this, Yeah, like you're saying, you know, mermaid adjacent, but she's still got that dog aspect. And I think probably that has a lot to do with the fact that the dogs are so prominent in her textual description that they would like want to keep them in somehow and so like beautify her while keeping those kind of more iconic descriptions of her.
Yeah, exactly, because it's it's a thing too of you know, as I said, you know, the form in art is very different from her odyssey form, which the odyssey form doesn't have any physical traits of being a dog as well, But how do you represent her dog like her canine like nature in a visual media like art, So hence the dog to my like that possibly mm hmm.
Yeah, it's really interesting and I mean it's also I think important, And we talked about this a bit in our very choppy recordings that I will include in the introduction and explanation of what happened for the listeners so they get it. But you know, we talked about this really briefly that like, it's especially in Greek mythology, and I don't know how it translates to the rest of the Mediterranean. So I'd love to hear more. But even though, like we're saying, you know, they don't have the kind of traditional idea of what we think of as mermaids, but they do of men. What they do have pretty explicitly is really only the Triton, where it's like he is both a singular son of Poseidon and Ampitriti and also later becomes like multiples, like there's there's multiple of him. So it's kind of an odd situation where it's like it both is kind of like a breed almost like a race almost of deity, and also just a singular person, which I think kind of it a little bit more on the same side of there being not the same traditional ideals of mermaids and mermen in Greek myth, like there's kind of that one outlier that's sort of odd.
Yeah, exactly, And that's it's not that I think about it too. I mean it is. It is very strange too, and we can get onto this a bit. I mean, this is another thing that nobody has a definitive answer on. Why does one singular god effectively become pluralized like that. It's it's just a very strange phenomenon. When you can think about it, you know, it's like taking Zeus or someone in there's suddenly multiple zeus Is. That wouldn't probably wouldn't happen the same way, because Zeus is a much more prominent figure in you know, in both religion and mythology, so he sort of retains his stable identity. It's just a singular figure like that, But with something like Trittan you know, you see the proper name trittin which one of the frustrating things with ancient languages is, you know, in English, we have this nice way of distinguishing between proper names and when something is just used as a as a normal word. So in English we kind of want to do capital T Tritten for the name of the guy, whereas we would when we're speaking of him, are they really as a pluralized Merman, you'd want to do lower case tea. But of course ancient texts don't have that sort of thing. So it's it's another interpretive problem as well. And we can get onto this in a bit too, that there's very many texts where we can't actually tell that the author intends for a singular treaton to be you know, the one guy, the one singular god son of Poseidon or just one of multiple tritons there as well.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
It just occurs to me too. I mean it's probably a sign that I think, as I said before, that you know, ancient Greek and Latin don't really have words for merman or mermaid, and so effectively the word tritten, when it becomes plurals to Tritton's, essentially stands in as the word for merman like that.
So yeah, it becomes like kind of taking on that word. But then also is one guy, and yeah, it's it's interesting, and it is a good reminder because I think that's something that doesn't it doesn't come up naturally on my show all that much, this kind of reminder to people who aren't necessarily familiar with ancient Greek, which is that like they only wrote an upper case, there was no punctuation. So it is very difficult to determine a lot of these things, primarily something like what you're talking about proper nouns and whose name and versus a noun. But then the other important thing to remember too is that so often, especially with deities, is that their name is like the verb almost or like the the you know, I guess it's a noun as well. Yeah, like I think of and this made me think of it, even when you're talking about the multiple tritons, is that it reminds me of of Aros and the erotes, where I mean, it's it's a good example of how Aros is the word for love and also the god Aos. But also it's an example of they're becoming plural of one god. And it's not really the same because the eerotes often have different names, but they don't always. But you can kind of understand why there are multiple erotes because it's more like there are multiple types of love, whereas it doesn't really apply to Triton, like there aren't multiple types of sea gods with the half fish body. So it's it's similar and not yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And that's another classic example of a god that seems to become pluralized. There's other examples with Pan as well. Pan becomes pluralized in a similar sort of way, which is just as mysterious as Trittan, you know, whereas you have arrows. That's I mean, it's this very emotive concept, as you were saying, you know, you can kind of imagine why something like that becomes pluralized because it's it's kind of halfway in with being an abstract concept already, but with something like the tritans in pan it's just it's even more bewildering in a way. There is a very good book by an scholar named m Ast and it's called mix Anthropole. The word, you know, basically means you know, any sort of God or Greek figure that's mixed with something else, that's part human mixed with other parts. And she's written a very good bit on this that's talking about sort of when you have this sort of mixture of something that's half human half something else that kind of already is breaking boundaries in a sense, and that might be something that in a way naturally leads into pluralization, if that makes sense in a way, because you're already breaking concepts in a way.
Yeah. It always reminds me, and this is something I think about a lot weirdly, but that the centaurs are really interesting in that respect because we have Chirn and then the other centaurs, and he seems so unique, like he doesn't fall into all the other stereotypes that come along with the centaurs as concepts and as like creatures like he just doesn't fit. And sometimes in art he even looks different, right, he's like more human than the other ones, And so it reminds me of that where it's just sort of like, I mean, it all comes back to so many things of Greek mythology, which is that like when you're talking about something that's banned a thousand years, it's very hard to figure out, you know, any kind of coherent why or how for these things. But it's fascinating to think about.
Well, that's a very good way to describe it. Actually, of Chiron in certain centaurs like that being depicted as more human. Emma Aston in her book on that, actually has a very great line that you know, we expect these things that are half human and half animal, we sometimes expect them to take on this very monstrous quality in terms of, you know, the popular definition of monsters something that's evil, ugly, beast like. But a lot of times when you see mixed anthropic figures, something that's half human and half something else, they actually get a way of what she calls superhumanity. Where you have with Chiron, he's known for, you know, being an expert in medicinal arts and things like that. So it's actually going in the opposite where they're in a way almost idealized humans, not in terms of physical forms or a beauty or anything like that, but in terms of things like, you know, human disciplines like medicine, and we kind of see a little bit of that with Tritton's as well, where they're not you know, they're not be steal monsters in the same sense, but they do seem to have some sort of control over the sea in a way. So that reflects the type of you might call it as sort of like an imagining of humanity within the sea, something that's half human but kind of thrives within the sea. Still.
Yeah, so that raises a good question, which is like, do we know much about what kind of role Triton actually played in the sea.
So this is a very good question that we can start with. I mean, the very beginning with Triton's history is the first thing to note about Triton if you were going to start at the very beginning, is he's not in the Iliad or the Odyssey at all, which, on one hand, is you could take it as evidence that maybe you know Triten the word only appears a bit later. But at the same time we do have to when we're thinking of that, we do have to say it a note of caution that the ility in the Odyssey aren't they don't cover every single bit of you know, archaic Greek mythology. But that's just sort of an interesting thing to note. Now in terms of his actual role. He first appears and he see its Theogony, which, for whatever reason, it's burned in my mind the specific lines, its lines nine thirty to nine thirty three to anyone that is curious about that. And that's actually we should say also with that later portion of he see its Theogony, that portion of it is usually regarded as a later sixth century edition, so it's not, you know, technically the same he seed, but a sort of later he sid that. You know, scholars suspect that that later portion of the poem is is just a later edition by someone in the sixth century, just because it gets I don't know, you read through it, it's a little bit, yeah, it's exactly.
Comes kind of a list of people's names.
Yeah, exactly. And so that's that's a very good way to put it, because we have so when Tritton's mentioned here in these three lines, it's just that Poseidon an Amphitrite, you know, Poseidon's Nyrid wife. They have a golden house beneath the sea, and they're with them. Lives Tritton, their son, and that's it. That's all we have for the first mention of the treaton. So he has no narrative role, no nothing. He's just kind of there and he see it and he just lives there. And you know, the text of that, it's so short, it doesn't even you might expect too for the narrative to then build on that genealogy, say who Tritton's children were, But there's nothing like that whatsoever. In fact, we have no sort of narrative of Tritton having children really other than this weird bit and Pausanius to come up with a name for the city of Tritea, which he claims is based on some daughter of trit name Triteia. But that's kind of a bs at the mall's for a city if you want to come up with one, you know.
But yeah, yeah, well, and that just reminds me, and we really don't have much in the way of narrative details on Poseidon's life in the sea broadly, like and we have almost nothing about Amphi Tridi. You know, she just kind of like is his wife. We kind of know how he got her more like caught horrifying. Yeah, and like that's basically all we know from her, whereas we have all these stories of Poseidon on land, like doing horrible things. Typically sometimes he does benign things, but it's mostly bad, but like, yeah, tends to more beyond land. And I I mean, I know, we also don't have a ton of you know, in the sea moments generally, but we do have that moment which I think you were kind of alluding to in the Iliad where when Thedus is angry. I think it's that she's probably piste about something to do with a Nias, right, she like goes right into the sea and like goes to Narius, I imagine. And like we have this actual scene where where there is a goddess traveling into this to the realm of the sea. But I don't think Poseidon is involved, if I remember correctly.
Now, not so much. There is a scene. We made it very briefly. I've actually written and just published a chapter in a book. It's called The Ancient Sea. Hmmm, the audience won't be able to see this, but of course, but it's The Ancient Sea by a guy named Hamish Williams and Ross Claire recently been published just on the underwater utopia, space and stuff like that, so people can check that out if they're interested in more on it. But yeah, I mean, this is a very good point. We do have Thetis at various points. You know. It's said just very generically, very briefly, that, oh, and then she dived back into the sea and returned to the home of her father and her sister Nyroids as well, but beside and he also has a sort of underwater palace. It's mentioned very briefly in book thirteen of the Iliad, and at least as far as I've theorized, these two places seem to be disconnected. In the Iliad, there we don't really have in the Iliad. There's a lot of sea goddesses or sea goddesses in gods as well in the Iliad, but the curious thing is they don't seem to be very well connected. They're kind of off doing their own things. And one of the odd things too in the Iliad is we have mentioned of the Niroids kind of incidentally as well, that the Nyrids in a way her you know, Thetis's sisters don't really play a big role. They're kind of just there as well. They don't really do much. And Thetis of course is involved in the Iliad because she's achilles mother, so it's it's a weird sort of place that they're in to begin with, that they're kind of sort of incidentally in there. If the Iliod had been you know, based on some other mythological hero, you can imagine a version where Thetis and the Nyroids are omitted completely, but we get these brief flashes like this of some underwater abode some I do believe. Yeah, part of it does say. It's hints that it's like a silvery cave as well, which is just very fascinating too. And we can go ahead and mention too you bring up Nirius as well. The very interesting thing about the Iliad as well is that he's never actually named in the text of the Iliad. It's always said to be the old man.
Of the sea.
Yeah, Hallias Garon in Greek. It's a very interesting phrase. And what's interesting too, I mean, since we're talking about sea people, this is one of the mysteries, not mysteries, but sort of uncertainties. Really is who is the Old Man of the Sea. Like I said, the Iliad just leaves him completely nameless as well, so we have no clue about a name for it there we presume, I mean, we can presume that it's maybe Niris, but that's something later that comes about. We first get the identification of the Old Man of the Sea with Niris in he see it's Theogony. He's the one that explicitly names that, and then he gives all the Nirid names as well. But in between those we of course have the Odyssey, and the Odyssey says that Proteus is the old Man of the Sea at one point in book four, I believe, and then there's a later part where Forky's is named to be the old Man of the sea. So it's kind of what seems to be going on there is that the Iliad, you know, just left it nameless, and then later poets who are involved in the Odyssey kind of speculated on the name, and then he see it again provides another name as well.
So I love that it just like it encapsulates so much of what's interesting and infuriating about Greek mythology, just like it's all baffling, and I love it exactly. The thing that like that made me think of especially because if we think of I mean, the varied possible Old Men of the Sea, specifically Proteasy Narius are both really interesting because they're like shape shifters, and they serve this really fascinating role of like being these water gods. But I think it's that both of them have stories where like a hero, I know, Heracles has to wrestle one of them, but I feel like somebody else also wrestles one of them, and they like transform into a ton of different forms and shapes and everything before they can finally, you know, be taken down, and it just it really I think suggests something about how the ancient Greeks saw the sea, which you and I talked a lot about in our last episode, which is just that, like I think it was so mysterious that it became this thing where it's really one of their more mysterious topics when it comes to the gods broadly, Like we're saying, there's so many possible Old Men of the Sea, there are so many gods of the sea, but then they're also like they don't seem to talk to each other or like interact. Like I mean, there are primordial gods of the sea, and then there's all of the Narreids, and then there's Poseidon, who's like the Olympian god of the sea, but he doesn't really seem to have much sway over the older ones. And like there's just so much kind of fascinating confusion to do with the deities involved with the sea.
Yeah, and yeah, that's that's a great way to point it out. It's it's one of the things I had to consider for the thesis. It is sort of like where to cut the line with this, because you do have a lot, you know, so I alter just did you know the Nyrods and the Trittons, But by no means are those the only ones. We do have a ton of them. And what's so fascinating to me is that, you know, once you start looking around, you find a lot of sort of dead figures in a way, like I mentioned four Kys, which if you look around, you know, there's not much at all on him, you know, he see its theogony mentions him in some of the genealogy, we have just frighteningly tiny references to him, passing references, and it just seems to be just another generic sea dog. We know his name and that's about it really, so uh, you know, just a figures like that.
Well, and what I love about Forcus is that we know his name primarily in relation to his daughters, multiple sets of daughters, right, because like Medusa and the Gorgons are the daughters of Forcus and Keto, and then so are the Gray Eye, which I love because then also it's it's Eschylus who wrote the Forkiddy's play, I think, where it's about the Gray Eye, I believe, and so like the daughters of Forcas, so it becomes this thing. And I think that's the version where they're like swan women too, which is another that's like a whole other level of weird. But that's what's great also both the Gray Eye and the Gorgans, which is that like they're both three sets of daughters of the sea, and and like Forcus and Keto being explicitly sea gods and sea monster goddess, but neither set of daughters are remotely involved with the sea, which I love like it just baffling and amazing.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it seems to be one of you know, to go back to your other point of you know, when you have sea gods that people try to wrestle with them, you know, you have this motif that they change into things, so that changeability mutability seems to be a characteristic of sea things in general. So the sea gods get that transfermative power, but also the things that are descended from them seem to be given that trait as well, and so you just get exactly things that you wouldn't associate some sort of swan type thing as being birthed from a sea god. Of course, yeah, it is what it is.
You know, it's great mythology here we are. Yeah, I'm curious, and I know you're you know, you are specifically mostly talking about the Narians and the tridents, but I'm curious about if you have any thoughts on on Amphitriti. But then also Thalassa, who is like just to add a toss in another sea character, which she's just kind of like the personification of the sea. But I ask because I think it's both of them or just the Lassa. But I came across visual representations, and I think they're primarily actually from Rome, but there are some incredible mosaics of either one or both of them where they're depicted as like this kind of like just this sort of half of a head emerging from the sea and they have little like crab horns on their head. Yeah, and I just I don't know, I don't even have a point to that. I just it so much, and it's such a it's another example of like just bizarre shit to do with the sea in the classical world.
Yeah. Well, I mean that's a good pairing that you bring up to anphatrite and thalassa, because there is actually I mean, it's fairly recent in scholarly terms of there's a twenty nineteen article by a good scholar named Jennifer Larsen who's putting, who put together a lot of stuff on anphatrite, and basically the way that she theorizes is so ANPHATRITI we have no mention of anphatrite whatsoever in the Iliad, but then in the Odyssey we do have again very passing sort of references to anphatrite. It'll be certain things like in book five. You know, the Keytae are mentioned, and there's this line of the keyte whom Anphatrite breeds in the sea. Now, what Jennifer Larson has theorized here is that when we use the name Anphatrite, and again this is a natural ambiguity with the Greek language, we don't know whether this is a name or not when the text is using it, or much less if it is a name, whether or not you know to what this is referring to. But Larson basically theorizes there that anphi Trite when it's used in the Odyssey is not referring to an anthropomorphic goddess as much as it is just a personification of the sea. So you might have the possibility then that it's some earlier period anphi Tride wasn't so much the anthropomorphic, you know, wife of Poseidon, but it's just this sort of name for the sea. And then when we get to he see it again, those same lines nine thirty to nine thirty three, that's when Larson theorizes that, you know, anphi Trite becomes the wife of Poseidon, the fully anthropomorphic god is then, so that's another interesting thing. And then you bring up Thalassa, we might have in a way the opposite going there, where the name of Thlasa just means you know, sea in Greek, so it's it's you know, it is their word for se. And then maybe that's eventually also becoming a sort of well, not the opposite there, but it is the same sort of thing where she's becoming an at least represented as an anthropomorphic god, is I think if I recall correctly too, we have mentions in Pausanias. He doesn't say what there they look like, but we do have references to him of representations of the last as well. So it seems to be a thing by the Roman period certainly.
Interesting well, And I mean that comes down to it, like or so much of Greek mythology and the characters come down to that general concept. It's something that my listeners have to struggle with with me all the time, which is that there will always ask questions of these gods, and like nine times out of ten they're like, oh my God, I just really want to know about this god. I know you can, You'll have all the answers, and I'm like, all the answers are It's just a concept that they put a name to and personified. I'm very sorry, Like it's you know, so often the gods are really just concepts that became they just were like, well, if it's a concept, then there's a god involved. They don't have a story, they don't have a background, they have nothing except this thing exists, and thus there should be a god. And it's just the same word. And you're like, okay, well it I love that part because I think that it just adds so much to our understanding of myth. But if you're coming at it without the background of like the absurdity of learning ancient sources and understanding them, then it just becomes frustrating because you're like, but I heard that this god exists, so why can't you tell me about them? And I'm like, well, that's just the way it works.
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times, I mean people, you know a lot of times when you read of sources on the Internet, it gives it as more being stable than it is, whereas sometimes have like just a fragment of a fragment really yeah, and so it's hard to trace down things, and then disappointing thing is you're trying to trace down things and you really get to the depths of what little we have and.
You're like, wow, there's really nothing. I've like exhausted everything. Yeah.
Yeah.
Somebody recently asked me if I could talk about a goddess named Despoyne, and I'm like, no, I'll tell you the minimal, which is that like there's a bunch of stuff in Pausanius about like a cult in Arcadia and that's it. And I'm like, okay, that's yeah, it's it's just a fascinating idea throughout all of Greek myth This is like deeply only related to our past things. But I do think that as a person who is has been from or has grown up on Vancouver Island, I have to share that on this silly little island, while it's an enormous island, but silly island in Canada, we do have both a lighthouse up into Fino named Amphitriti, and we have one of our biggest, like most popular like swimming lake down here outside of Victoria is called Thetis. So we've really got some great yeah, some great like see God representation on my island. Yeah, so okay, I want is there much more to know about these Tritons, Like, I feel like those are characters that I've not touched upon, like almost at all in the podcast, so I would love to hear. I mean, they're tricky, I imagine, but everything.
So there is perhaps one actual myth of you know, Triting, the singular god that we can mention before getting onto the plural ones, which is his myth of the or the myth of the encounter of him with the Argonauts. And this is another very weird sort of thing, because we just said, you know, doing this chronologically, we just said, you know, the sixth century bit of he Seid, you know, depicts him as a god under the sea. Now, all of a sudden when we get the earliest bit of this myth of his encounter with the argonauts is in Pindar, and that's the fifth century, and here he's essentially depicted as a sort of lake god, which is again very strange that he's also late god apparently. And the basic sort of myth there is that the best version of it is in Apollonius is Argonautica, but of course we do have earlier bits of it and Heroditus and Pindar as well. The basic gist of it, though, is that the Argonauts are on their travels they get blown off course and they get blown so far into Libya that they come to this lake Tritonis, which is apparently named after this god Tritton as well, and there is a river Tritonis as well, and sometimes even more confusingly, the lake I believe is just called Lake Tritton as well. But basically they just get blown off course and they The best version of it, I say again too, is in Opollonius, where we have this this great scene. It's actually depicted that they go to the shore and they offer sacrifice for the local god to you know, come help them out of the out of the circumstances they've gotten. And this guy basically walks up introduces himself as the son of Poseidon, and at this, you know, we presume up on the shore line, he's fully anthropomorphic. He looks just like any other you know, guy out there. And so he promises them to show where they where to go, and he directs them, you know, you go to this part of the lake to get out into this channel that leads back into you know, the open sea as well, and so they do that. They go board the boat again, and as they're boarding the boat, they see that guy that they just talk to walk into the lake, and so this is very clearly a divine sort of miracle as well. And then as they're sort of sailing away all the Argonauts, you can really feel the joy in this scene of a miraculous encounter with a god. All the Argonauts beg Jason as their leader, to sacrifice something to this great god that they've just met and that has saved them. And so Jason, you know, grabs the best sheep they have or whatever and cuts its throat over the back of the boat, and you get the scene that it's just barely I love the way it's described as well, that you see hints of Posid or not Poseidon. Tritton's fishtail in the water described also as the tail end of akitas as well, the ancient word for sea monster. So we have this fascinating scene that alludes to that merman form again of as just the singular god there. And so I also bring up that scene too a lot because Tritten there is also called a teros, and this is the ancient Greek word for monster a lot of times, and so this is a very good example that I use a lot to explain to people the concept of ancient monstrosity a lot of times that even though we have this figure that yeah, he is sort of half monster, half sea monster, he's half human. It's not really in the modern sense of evil or big bad, ugly monster type thing. An encounter with a teros, a monster in the ancient world, is also an encounter with a divine im portent. And again, as I say, if you read through this scene, it's a very happy, elated reaction as well. So that's I mean, basely that scene, that narrative of the encounter of the Argonauts is really the only narrative role that we have of trit and the singular god. We do have what appears in ancient art at least to be Heracles wrestling him as well, and that's sort of in the mold of you know, men Alaous and Proteus wrestling as well. But confusingly, we only have like one very brief narrative or textual reference to it, and it's in Apollodorus, and he actually there mentions Heracles wrestling with Niris instead. So it's another one of those little confusions as well that sometimes Nirius himself. Another sea god is represented with the merman form too.
It's so funny the a Polonius that you were mentioning, because I mean, I've covered the Argonautica a lot on the show, including just having read a full version of it, like almost like an audiobook, And as soon as you've said it, I was like, why can't I think of a moment where they encountered trite And then you said lake and I was like, oh, of course, but it's because my brain didn't want to think of it as a lake. And then the moment you say like, I'm like, oh, I remember that scene completely because it's exactly how you describe it. It's beautiful and like magical in this really lovely way, but it is odd that it's a lake. And then am I wrong if you know that? I feel like that lake also has some connections to Athena and there's like a story to do with her, and is it palace I think? And that lake?
Yeah, yes, so yeah. So throughout the Iliad, Athena gets this epithet trito guinea. And this is another thing people speculate what this word is supposed to mean. We don't really know. One of the ways to translate it into English is often Athena trit and born, and there is a myth in throughout the ancient world that Athena was born at this lake Tritton, and so that's where a lot of it sometimes comes in as well.
Yeah, I'm glad I remember all of that. It's like very proud of my own memory today. Oh yeah, it's I love that. And it really connects with one of my other favorite things when it comes to talking about like water gods in Greek mythology, which is just the way they seemed to separate saltwater from freshwater and also like not at all like just the idea that like oceanis is a freshwater god and that there was this like concept of a freshwater river that ran around the world, and then the sea is not like we get the word ocean, but it didn't mean ocean. And I just it's fascinating and it to me, it really the Triton lake is really deeply sounds deeply connected to that because it's another way of kind of like smushing together these ideas of what is a sea and what is a lake and everything between.
Yeah, exactly, I mean that's that's a good way to put it that, I mean so much of it, you know, as I was saying before, you know, a lot of the earlier stuff is that they seem disconnected in a lot of ways, but some of the lighter stuff is sort of just smashing them together. So it may be the point that, you know, try and exist on his own as a late god, and then someone a bit lighter kind of smashed them together with Poseidon. I mean, you could see the rational for why a late god should be the sort of sun of a sea god, and then why that kind of pulls him into the marine direction as well too, which is another fascinating change there.
Well. And I wonder if they like found a saltwater lake once and then you know, we're kind of making decisions based on that too, and it's you know, who knows. And they also might not have made deep connections with the difference between salt and fresh water when it comes to like large bodies of water, because the also didn't have it's not like, you know, they would have the concept of the oceans as we think of them. They had the Mediterranean, which was not very salable, but considerably more saleable in the ancient world than like the Atlantic or the Pacific, and so their concept of what constitutes ocean versus large lake or probably very different than what we would imagine.
M yeah, very very much. So there is I'll it's preserved in Seneca. I always think of this when I think of the difference between you know, ocean and ancient terms and sea as well, because we have this great bit that Seneca is, you know, recording it from another poet as well, that he's talking about Germanicus's voyage, when one of the Romans generals at this time that did this whole voyage that's basically off the coast of France and up towards what we would now call, i mean, the you know, northern European coast, not too terribly far. But there's this great line that's recorded in this that's something along the lines of why are we violating strange waters that venturing out? You know, to us it's just kind of similar sort of things. Yes, it's the Atlantic Ocean. It's different from the Mediterranean, but to us it's just two big bodies of water. But to them oceanus is a sacred space. And so to be going out there sailing that there's a real sense of trepidation as well, whereas, as I understand it, at least the currents are a bit worse in the English Channel and along northern Europe as well, whereas the Mediterranean is a little bit more calm. So you can you can imagine the fear that a lot of Roman sailors might have had going on a voyage like that.
Yeah, well, I mean that brings you back to our last episode, which is just that. As somebody who grew up on an island in the Pacific, I like, so, I spend a lot of time in Greece now, and one of the things that perpetually blows my mind is how much the Mediterranean doesn't change, like it the tide at least when I go, which have been a few different times of the year, but the tide is so minimal, it's like a foot or maybe two feet. Meanwhile, I come from an island where we have areas where the tide is like a kilometer long, and like you can the title go out and you can walk for a kilometer before you hit water, and later in the day it's all the way up there. And then meanwhile, I spend these hours on the beach in Greece, and I'm like, you're not moving, it's so weird. And so I imagine the difference of getting out into the Atlantic in any form. It would be so visually different that it would feel like a completely different space. And like, I know, the Mediterranean can get wild, but at the same time it has these aspects that are infinitely calmer and more sort of restrained than the larger seas that they would have encountered going beyond.
Yeah, exactly, that's that's a good way to put it. And there's actually an interesting thing too that I found with my thesis as well, is that, you know, we have all sorts of references to sea monsters. That bit from Seneca that's preserved in Sinica at least it does have some nice sea monster references as well. I think, as I said on the last episode, you know, we do have references that's in the Atlantic and what they knew of the Red Sea in the Indian Ocean as well, we have sea monster references out that far. But in terms of sea people, there's actually no well almost no, I will say. I mean, there's a couple of scattered obscure bits, but we don't see it nearless prevently to have these sort of like sea goddess or anthropomorphic forms at least out in you know, the Atlantic coast or anything like that. So we don't really get too many narratives of Tritton's or nyroids just kind of hanging about at the edges of the world, maybe because the Mediterranean was at least perceived as a more calm place and so you don't really have I mean, obviously you still have sea monsters there, but you know, kind of common sense that it might be a place for sea gods as well.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes sense if they're seeing the differences in terms of like the water itself, it would be rational that like the nice anthropomorphic gods would want to spend their time, I mean, like the calmer Mediterranean. Yeah, it seems it could be a nicer place to live.
Yeah, which is another good thing to point out. I mean, I don't want to characterize, you know, the sea gods and goddesses this holy benevolent, because we do have, you know, sort of bad narratives of them, but they do. One of the prominent roles of them is that they are associated with aiding sailors from time to time, with that sort of the myth of Tritton's encounter with the Argonauts. In a way, that's the sort of version of that too. Obviously he's not a marine god there, but still similar sort of concept. And there's actually a great story that's actually the first reference to plural Trittons in any ancient text, which is a fun little story that we have preserved by Athenaeus in a historian by the name of to Maaeus of Tarrominium, and he gives us this, this nice little tale. So this guy, we don't really know what his text was about, but this fragment that's preserved in Athenaeus, he tells about a local legend of this house in Sicily that the locals all called it Trirene. Now, why in the world would you name a house Trirene, you might ask, Well, Tomay, it's goes on to explain the story that you know, once upon a time, essentially this house, a bunch of young guys were living in this house. And so what do they do naturally when they have nothing to do, but they get really really drunk. Of course, why not these guys They get so drunk as well that they begin to hallucinate, and they hallucinate that the house is actually a ship that's in the middle of a storm. And so what do you do when you're on a ship in the middle of the storm, but you lighten the load, you throw everything overboard. So these very drunk, hallucinating guys begin hurling all of the furniture out of the house, throwing it out the windows. Obviously, as you can imagine, this causes a bit of a disturbance to everyone around, and the local magistrates apparently get called in, and so they knock on the door and all of that and ask them what the hell's up with all of this, and the first guy answers it, still hallucinating the way he answers it is he says, oh tritones andres oh trittin men, thank you for saving us. So he's hallucinating that, you know, the local magistrates are presumably the fishtail trittons that have saved them. So that's a very weird but funny story. And that's actually the first I know. I was so happy to come across that story, but should also be able to tell that as part of my research too for the pieces.
So well, like the idea that that's the first mention of multiple also kind of suggests like like a little something extra to their being multiple, which is that it is a fever dream, you know, like was that always the case or is that come in later and like inspired almost by these like super drunk dudes who were doing dumb shit at their house.
Yeah, exactly, and it's very weird. I mean, we don't got to get too in depth in the terms of the Greek grammar, but the way it's used there is the phrase tritonees andres it's actually being used as an adjective. They're almost tritten men, which is is another just a peculiar formation there. We don't to my knowledge, we don't actually see that formation anywhere else. It's just trittn's after that. Yeah, but even still, I mean, just this is why you study Greek mythology people to find stories like this.
Of course, so often we treat these ancient people as being so like brilliant and revered and like like there it's like they're above goofy and silly and ridiculous, and they will not. And that's what makes it so much fun, is to find the goofy and the silly and ridiculous like drunk dudes deciding that their house is of ship exactly.
Oh, I was just gonna say, so that story that we have from Timaeus Atarrominium that dates to about if it is a genuine fragment, that dates to about the fourth century BC, which is about the time that we start to see you know, other plural treatons in art as well. So that seems to be about the beginning of the pluralization of the treatons, which you know, go on to become a major thing in Roman times as well.
Interesting And do you know, offhand, I'm trying to I think this is what it is. But I feel like in the Agora today there are like a couple standing statues like they're they're sort of like almost in the center when you walk in, and they're like the only tall remaining statues, And I think a couple of them are tritons in there. It just makes me think of that Athenian version. But I'm there's some kind of see gods, But I'm trying to remember if that's what they're like named as or not.
I might be wrong, but no, I don't know. Is it a modern depiction you're saying, or.
A no No, they're like standing, they're a couple like just remaining. They're they're odd, they're like very tall. I'll look it up and I'll figure it out because they're they're still there today, and I'm just curious. But one thing I was going to mention earlier too, when you mentioned that, you know, a lot of the sometimes they're depicted as benevolent and safety to sailors and things, I immediately thought of, which I know I already pressed you about the last time you're on my show, but the Samultharation mystery cults, because I am obsessed with Samothration mystery called but that was That's an example and is also in the Argonautica story of this like a very explicit way of seeking out safety upon the seas, which has always fascinated me. This this idea that they not only would imagine that the gods would often give it to them, but that there was kind of a way that you could go and you could like get more explicit help just in case because it was such a dangerous thing to be out there on the sea.
Are you talking about just in general with them or yeah.
Yeah, just an idea that you could like kind of seek it out specifically versus like just praying to the gods. But you know, actually it's kind of like the oly Stating mysteries, where you would, you know, get a blessed after life, or you could go to samoth Race and you could get inducted and you would have this kind of like extra level of safety upon the seas.
Yeah, I've definitely heard of it, and it definitely salutes the sort of general idea as well of always praying to a specifical sea god or a god that is specifically for this as well. I don't know too much about the cult in general, but yeah, I have definitely heard that before that I think, I mean with the diascory as well, though, or there are another sort of cult that, for not clear reasons, become associated with sort of protection at sea as well. But yeah, that's that's another interesting thing too, that you have so many gods like that devoted specifically towards that.
M M. You just kind of it's just interesting in the way that they, you know, they just clearly recognized it as not only something that they needed, but something that they could like really seek out. And that I mean, I just rant with the samoth Race mystery cult all the time, but very few people know much about it, and I don't blame them because it's very niche. But it does also appear in the Argonautica in this like passing reference that like on their way to Colchis they went to Samothrace to specifically get inducted so that they would have like a safer journey continuing.
On, Yeah, that would make perfect sense now that I remember it too, and the in the this probably isn't connected to that too, but in thinking of, you know, the same sort of motif of protection at sea and stuff like that, as well as a sort of farcical scenes too. We do have in the Argonautica as well a scene where the Nyroids come and help the Argonauts through the uh, the Wondering Rocks as well, and so we have well, as the listeners will know if if you've read, if they you know, if they've listened to the scene of this, we have this very peculiar scene where they they sort of come out of the sea and this is one of the ways that we seem to know that the Nyroids can come up on my end. They come up on the shores and we just get this scene where it's compared to them basically bouncing a ball back and forth on the on the beach playing a game of where they sort of like throw the rgo back and forth to get it across safely as well, which I don't know. That must be some sort of oak on.
I love that it's been too long. I just want to read the Argonautica again. God. Yeah, So with all the text that I like here in these moments, like it's like two years, I don't remember that well enough I need to, But yeah, I mean there's just there's so much in that work though too that that's so interesting and kind of unique. And then of course you have the later aspects, Like the reason I think that Samothrace appears in it is that Samothrace as like an ancient you know, site and space is very very ancient. They actually found linear a on there, which is the thing that blew my mind and I will talk about it whenever possible. Yeah, all the way up there. It's the furthest North. It's crazy anyway. But in terms of like it being the mystery cult being a prominent thing in the ancient world that was Hellenistic, so I think it ties in too, Apollonius too, so he's got this like specific time period that he's working with and sort of also inserted the Samarration cult into that because it was so big by his time, but it was not as a mystery cult. It was not that big, you know, in the earlier period, so it doesn't really appear in any kind of other you know, epic. This none of this is particularly relevant for you. I just need to talk about sandwith race is at all possible, So thank you for very well, But no, it's all good.
It's it all. I mean, it relates back to the same concept of finding some sort of aid at sea from some sort of god like this of this is why in a way, I mean you can imagine in general two of there's maybe a bit of sense of safety of just being able to imagine that there are sea gods, of something that's full of human like the Nyroids or at least half human, that in a way it's projecting out the human element into the sea that obviously we can't especially in the ancient world with no diving technology or nothing like that, no submarines, you can't permanently live at sea or underneath the sea as well, so this is a sort of way of imagining that as well. And when you sort of have even ones that may not be you know, half you know, sea monster or fish or something like that, like the gods of Samothrace, being able to have that human element that's helping you at sea, you know, this very uncertain, very unstable element is really a measure of safety in a lot of ways.
Yeah, I imagine it'd be very comforting to have like human elements that you can imagine under those waves, because without that they would just be this like terrifying mystery. You just know, people die in there all the time, so you'd want that human element as like just yeah, discomfort.
And one of the things too, that's so striking about the tritons and the nyroids is not only are they sort of like physically human, but they do have human behavioral characteristics as well. So the nyroids are very often said to be dancing. We have a one myth from Bachilodes where theseus goes down to the underwater world and it's described that he sees the nyroids dancing there. All sorts of other passing literary references as well, and then the tritons are heavily associated with music too. In art they often have sort of shell trumpets as well, and they get widely associated with that as well. So dance and song becomes these very human elements that become projected into the sea like that with the sea people.
That's really interesting. I didn't know that music connection. It's it's lovely and confusing kind of imagine music in the sea. But that does remind me though. So do you know much about the use of hippocamps, because those are always just like so fun yep.
I wrote a whole appendix of the thesis on hippocamp It's actually amazing.
What like do they appear in much text sourcing. I feel like all I ever do is see them visually, but I would love to know more about them.
So that that's a very good point actually that I mean, the hippocamps are very rare in textual sources. They seem to be a creature that's sort of born out of art and a lot of times people this is another thing. We don't know exactly where the hippocamps come from either. Some people speculate that it might be a sort of because Poseidon is the god of the sea, and he's also the god of horses as well. Some people speculate that it might just be a sort of thing that was invented to combine both of his halves, and so we have a sea horse in the sense of a mythical creature like that as well. Some people, i mean sort of speculate that it might be a seahorse in the literal sense of the actual animal seahorse that's just going sort of been expanded out into an actual mythical horse in a way, because if you look at actual seahorses, they're tiny little animals, but you can see why they're called seahorses because they do have a very equine looking snout as well. So that's another thing that they might be sort of expansions of those And so that's a good thing to bring up with the sea people as well, because not only do we project the imagined ideas of sea people out into this very uncertain realm, but they're also given, especially with the nyroids that are fully anthropomorphic, they're given horses to ride on, and you know, especially in ancient art, you can i mean just google any one of hundreds of depictions of hippocamps, but we have nyroids very frequently depicted riding them, and so you know, that's just another sort of thing that you can kind of see that maybe there was a little bit of concern. You know, you have the trettons that they have their own way of making their way through the water like that, but the nyrids, you know, presumably they can swim well, but they're given horses and animal companions like that to ride on, especially in ancient art, and it's just a massive thing. In ancient art. We have hundreds, I don't know, if not thousands of extent examples of hippocamps and all sorts of artistic media, but very very rare in textual sources though, just it just seems to be one of those things that, for whatever reason, they just didn't incorporate as much into their literature, probably because there is no sort of narrative role for hippocamps in literary sources. We do have, you know, certain sources. I think Stacious is a good example where he depicts Poseidon driving a chariot with hippocamps, But then we also have other references where it's just beside drives a chariot with normal horses. It makes no real difference in terms of narrative there. It's just an aesthetic preference really, and so it's kept mostly to art there. But yeah, that is a very good thing to bring up with the sea people, these sort of sea versions of terrestrial animals like that.
Yeah. Well, my other favorite is the like sea goat of Capricorn, which is also baffling in weird and a great way, and that like, I don't really think it features into any text sources, and it's like there's like only a handful of even visual if I recall, but I could be very wrong. It's been a while.
Yeah, that's right. I mean there's a few of those. I think that one is another white rare one. We do have, yeah, a sea goat like that Capricorn. We do have sea panthers, sea lions as well. What else can I remember offhand? I have a whole list of these somewhere. Actually, I would love.
To see the I mean I think of sea lion and I just think of it of a sea lion.
But hippocamps are obviously the most prevalent sea bulls, sea panthers, sea lions, tigers, sea stags, sea lynxes, and sea rams. And we have one representation I have here in my list of a sea donkey as well. Yeah, I don't recall that one offhand. I might have to dig that one up again for my own amusement. Yeah, yeah, I will. But those sort of later ones too, I mean, it seems to be. And this is another great thing about ancient mythology is that you have such great invasions like this that we presume the hippocamps were first, and then it seems to be later innovations where artists just literally must have said, you know, if we have a half fish half horse thing, why can't we do that with other terrestran Yeah, and so I know that lines up exactly. And so this is this is again why you study Greek mythology, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's just the best. But yeah, I mean it's just there. It's all just so silly, and like the sea is so ripe for that, and I I appreciate learning all of these various sea things. I will update you because I looked up the the treitings I was talking about in the Agora, and it looks like I just googled it very simply, but it looks like they're at what is the Odeon of Agrippa, so they must be a Roman addition. But they are like ruins of them do still exist in the in the Agora now they're like, oh, that's what they call them. They call them triton shaped pillars, these like kind of pedestals with this enormous traite something I see better form than others.
Yeah, I said, that's that's very good. I've never seen.
Yeah, they're enormous. They're like twenty feet tall and they're great Jesus.
Yeah that I think I mentioned it in one of the fragments earlier. But yeah, this sort of like tritt and material culture stuff. They seem to be very popular for the Romans especially. We have references to you know, Roman fountains made out of trittons and stuff like that, or shaped like Tritton's, I should say. So they're just very popular, and it seems the Romans really took a shine to that sort of merman form that it's it's just something interesting to depict in terms of statutory references as well, that you know, why not deviate from the norm. You know, we have all these statues of just fully humanoid things. That's boring. Why not, you know, bring in a Murman every now and then.
Well, and it reminds me of how many incredible Roman and mosaics, or Roman period mosaics there are of the sea gods, like that's where the either Infratrite or the Last Hour, I guess it'd be Mare like that with a little crab on her head, and so like, all of that comes from Roman mosaics, and they just they did. And I think a lot of the hippocamps and a lot of that stuff. They did such a beautiful job of depicting bizarre sea creatures in their mosaics, for sure, like I would, I imagine it's more than in the Greek.
Yeah, which now that I mean somewhat randomly. I do recall a very interesting Roman story that gets back to we were talking a bit earlier as well about Trittan not being the nicest person as well, and this I always remember this one very bizarre scene from the Eneid, from Virgil's Aeneid, so we have in book six of the Eneid, famous mostly for being the book where he goes down to the underworld, of course, But before we get to that, there's just a bit where they come ashore on Italy, the story of Mycenus or Missinus rather, and this this Trojan. He was famed, according to Virgil, as he tells us, for being the best trumpet here out of all of the Trojans. And so they've come ashore and they found his dead body there. Why has this just happened? And so it flashes back to a bit earlier in the narrative of this famous trumpet Here he was just sitting on the boat as you do, and just playing his trumpet. Of course, when it turns out his trumpet playing was so good that Tritton became jealous of it and just snatched him off the boat and drowned him. And then of course they come across his dead body later on, and so again this is this is the other A great thing about Greek mythology of it shows it shows you in a way, you know, this is sort of the motif that we we've said before of the Irakney motif for someone claims to be better than a god and they bad things happened to them. But in this example, you know, the poor guy didn't even claim to be better than the trace. He was just playing and he gets snatched off the boat and drown so because the Triton couldn't handle that.
I have always stood by that Poseidon is like the the almost like going under the radar, as the absolute most dangerous god, and I think that that comes back to the sea. But it's always interested me that it seems like Poseidon and Tryton both tend to have a lot of I mean, Tryton less of there's like less stories generally, but Poseidon is really bad in like ninety percent of his stories. Like I don't think there is a single story of him being with a woman that could be easily construed as her wanting to be there. And meanwhile, all of the other see god, like the Nareids and even Narreus and Prodius and everyone, they don't have the same level of violence. Like people have to wrestle the gods sometimes, but it's it's not like it's usually to like get something, it's not because they've done something horrible. And that's just always interested me that Poseidon does have that that really violent streak comparatively, and so it's unsurprising that then Tryton would have like little aspects of that kind of tucked into Yeah exactly.
I mean in a way you can imagine why they thought that of a sea god, where it's like you pray to Poseidon sort of to let you live on a sea voyage. Your reward from Poseidon is being allowed to live, So it's kind of a god that's like you don't really get anything in a positive sense from your rewards. You made the journey safely, whereas if you do something similar thing with Tritten, if you do something to upset them, you get pulled off the boat and drowned. You know, so you know they can be fickle gods in a way.
Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, the best case scenario is just them you getting by without them noticing kind of thing, or just them letting you pass.
Yeah, yeah, not you don't end up like Odysseus, which is yeah, well, another fascinating thing to think about in general. Just I often. I think I might have mentioned in on the last podcast that you know, if you're a sailor in the one of the central poems of your culture is about a man that was lost at sea, and that man was lost at sea because he pissed off the sea god.
Like, yeah, you're not going to really want to go out that much.
Are you exactly?
Yeah. It reminds me of there's like a great meme that goes around every once in a while where where it's like probably some image of Odysseus, but the text being like, oh, what are we doing. We're going on an odyssey? What's an odyssey? Well yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah exactly, and then oh what's Yeah. I mean, I love the Odyssey so much, I think a lot because it features the sea and such interesting and violent ways. But even the way you were talking about the representation of the sea gods in the Iliad kind of versus the Odyssey sort of reminded me of the generally fascinating thing between the two. But I like that it's it revolves around the sea as well, which is just that like they really don't seem to match with each other that well, Like they really the more you think about them and read them, they really seem very clearly to be written by vastly different either time periods or people or what have you, whatever it is, you know, but they really, like it's like they don't exist in the same mythological realm sometimes in interesting ways.
Especially in the Odyssey of You know, when you have these characters like the Nyroids that were just they were spoken of in the Iliad, of course, when you don't really have that maybe for just purely narrative purposes, that we don't have these gods that are or goddesses rather that are associated with saving sailors like that when you really need them like that. So in a way, it's a very bleak depiction of the sea where the only god really I mean, yes, there's Proteus and other hints of sea gods, but obviously the main god, the main sea god of the Odyssey is Poseidon, and he's not too happy there as well.
The fact that the sea gods kind of heavily involved or even just like in major plot points in the Odyssey are i know, Lukathea and Poseidon versus the Iliad where Poseidon's involved, but Poseidon is not involved as a sea god. Poseidon is involved as like a he hates Troy god. And then there's the Thetis and Narius part where they're kind of the god's physically in the sea in the Alien and that's so it feels of contradictory in interesting ways.
Yeah, very much so. And one of the interesting points too, I don't I don't think we've mentioned too is the fact that you know, we do have de Niroids that obviously most of them, most of their narrative role is bound up with Thetis is that singular individual. But we do also have you know that there are supposedly fifty nyroids in total, and we do have this very honestly kind of boring bit of the Iliad in book eighteen where about thirty three of their names are just listed off and he makes what are apparently the full fifty. The two lists don't agree, but the fact that we have, you know, it's not sort of just left it. Oh, there are fifty nyroids, but the fact that Poet's attempt to give all of their names, that again another very human element of the sea as well, that you know they have names, presumably they have personalities, individual histories, backstories and stuff like that that are just imagined in the sea as well. So you know, Luco Thea might be in a way, in an off branch of that, just another sea goddess who has her own name, and we do know obviously a bit about her backstory that uniquely she was once a mortal transformed into a sea goddess like that as well.
But I also think I wonder too about that, and like whether I don't remember in the Odyssey whether any of that back crown is presented, or whether she that could be like a retconning later where it's like a later invention that she's the I know that's the daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, which much I know about her because I love those characters, like so I have a big thing for the House of Thebes. But but yeah, I feel like in the Odyssey that's not really part of it, so it also could be, Yeah, that later kind of invention just so, so much of the Odyssey is kind of like.
That, Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I think that is the way I can't recall offhand with her, but yeah, definitely so. And I mean we see other hints of that too, like with the nyrid Galateea too, we have Again she's just a passing name in the iLiad's list, but she gets a much fuller myth in the Hellenistic period with the story of her love with or poly Femus's love for her and things like that. So later expansions on these these otherwise nameless figures like that.
Yeah, rond of Skillet too, because like she you know, she's just Skilla in the Odyssey, and then later she gets this whole story with like Circe and Glaucus and everything where where there might be like a passing reference in relation to her with Circe, but it's not, you know, it's fully like spelled out much later. I know in most details it's an avid so who even knows about that? But but yeah, I mean there's so much of that or even I always think about how Calypso is like just in the Odyssey, I think where she doesn't really feature into anywhere else at all, but it's like super important in the Odyssey as a divinity. And I mean that's that's the case with so much of Homer. So I love that about Homer.
But yeah, exactly. It's Yeah. Another fascinating thing about mythology in general is that it's just waves of expansion like that of different authors, you know, making their own take and everything on it like that.
I mean, God, it's it's also fascinating. Are there any other see gods or characters that you wanted to talk about today?
Mmm? I do have an odd but very exceptional Nyroid story that's kind of interesting to get away. So this is actually I mean, I say this is very exceptional for a lot of reasons, but I'm kind of telling it just because it's an interesting story. So it's another lost text by a fellow by the name of Narcis who he was actually one of Alexander's generals who who went off with him and wrote an apparent text it's not lost to us. That's describing a lot of this, and he includes a lot of strange stories. One of them is this one, which it purports to be an Irid, but I think it's kind of just a story he picked up in the East where they've kind of just applied the name Irid to it. It's another one of these weird sort of things of when you talk about cultural transmissions of stories and ideas, sometimes they just stick their own names on things. So basically, he tells about this island that the first legend about this island is that anyone that goes to the island never returns. And so what does an the archist do. He decides to sail to the island, and sure enough he returned, and to write this text. So he pretty much did that just to dispel the myth, and he literally calls it an empty myth as well and writes about it afterwards. So he did that purposely for you know, dispelling this myth about this random island. But he goes on to tell another story that's apparently told about the island, which is one of the Nirids used to dwell on the island as well a long time ago. This is we have a very fairy tale sort of nature to this, And as the story goes, this Nirid just living on this island would have sex with any men that would come across the island, but afterwards she would turn them into fish and throw them into the sea. Amazing, And so the rest of the story is just apparently this. This is why I say this is a very weird story, because this island was also apparently sacred to he the sun god, And so Helios gets very mad at the Nyrod for unknown reasons that she's doing this sort of thing and forces her to turn them all back into men. And this is allegedly the origin of the fish eaters from Herouditus as well, that you know these people that are just called fish eaters. So we have this very weird, exceptional story where just an Irid is supposedly hanging out on an island, and I bring this up too. I remember this because you can kind of see a hint of this with the Calypso story as well, that she didn't really trick Odysseus I suppose, but she's kind of keeping him on the island in a way. So it's just a very exceptional and very weird story of an Irid that I bring that up too because it's an interesting story, but it's it's also one that kind of hints it something we don't really see a lot with the Nirids as well, that you might expect that they don't really have this sort of siren like quality or this sort of like seductress folklore motif. That's the only story that we really have of that sort of thing. So I bring that up in the thesis as well. Sometimes that when we have exceptional stories like that, sometimes that helps us to really delimit what things are by saying what they aren't in a way.
Right, So yeah, yeah, no, that is really unique because yeah, the Nareas don't really have any kind of like, yeah, any like malevolent streaks in the rest of the myth and like a lot of other groups, you know, they're just kind of there being nice. But that story also reminds me of Circe, Like it almost feels like a kind of combination of Calypso and Circe, like squished into one. Yeah, it's like because Serce doesn't she doesn't, you know, having sex with all the guys she turned into pigs, but she did like to transform, so yeah, it feels like kind of squishing them both. And then the Helio's reference is interesting because it both connects to Circe and the like just generally I love and it took me way too long to notice this trend. Now it's like embarrassing, but that I never really made the connection that, like all so many stories of regions to the east featured like I think specifically of like Kulkis and Medea, and it's they they're just the children of Helios and that's where the sun rises. And it really took me a long time to make that connection. But it reminds me of that also because of this is like a very kind of like Eastern story, then inserting Helios into it really kind of solidifies that location, which is fascinating.
Yeah, yeah, it's just another weird thing of we don't know where this strange story came from, because this is total exception with the Nyrons, and we just have randomly helios thrown in there as well. Again, another great thing about Greek mythology that we sometimes in popular culture it's assumed that the stories were sort of set in stone and things like that. Yeah, there's ones that I would love to know the ancient reception of things like this, of is it just kind of did people read this and they were like what.
Yeah, I think about that all the time, with like little unique bits and pieces like did they also think that that was utter nonsense? Or was that one of the ones that they believed like where was the line drawn? And I would love to hear it exactly. Oh my gosh. Well this has been absolutely fascinating. As you know, from last time, I could talk about things in the sea forever. So I'm very glad that you came back on the show to talk about more cdities. Thank you so much.
Yeah, no problem, I'm always happy to talk about any of my research. Really good.
Well, I'm glad your research is very connected to how I grew up, which is clear from both of the episodes that we have done. So I always have way more to say and I'm thrilled to have you want to talk about it? So do you want to tell my listeners like where they can find more? Will you read things? Whatever you want to share?
I mean you can find me, I mean nominally online on Twitter at Sea Monster Guy from you know, dealing with my other research, I'm not too terribly much on Twitter. I do have a number of publications either out or coming out, doing you know, other things. I imagine the listeners of this podcast will like various things that I do on I'm doing a thing on the Phoenix myth this summer. I actually at a conference as well. And like I said, the book The Ancient Sea is already out on the sort of underwater utopia world as well, if you're interested in that. And yeah, just various other things. You know, what is another one. I can't think of any of my other ones at the moment, but you know, just look out for my various publications coming out usually, I will say too, another place to probably find me in the future with hopefully another article. If you like some of the stuff I've been talking about here as well. The journal preter Nature is very good for all sorts of like mythical and scholarly studies of what they call the preternatural, the supernatural, things like that, and it's very much something that I think if any of the audience here are interested in mythology, folkal or you not only like that journal, but this is a very good time to you know, really get into the study of it as well. If you're thinking about doing a PhD or pursuing a career in this sort of stuff that I do, then you know, it's a very good time scholarly wise, because it's becoming a very big thing in the field of classics too.
That's awesome. I mean, that's all my favorite stuff, so I'm glad to hear it. Well, I'll link to a few things in the episode's description then, but yeah, thank you so much again for doing this. It has been so much fun.
Thank you for having me.
Nerds, nerds and nerds. I am still laughing at having to say the title of this episode, but I had to thank you all for listening. As always, I just fucking love conversation episodes. They're they're so interesting and so niche and weird sometimes and just like gods, there is just an endless amount of information to learn about the ancient world. And the fact that I get to have these experts on to share it all with me and thus you is my favorite thing in the world. And you all keep that happening by listening and loving these episodes just as much as every other. I fucking love it. Learning is fun, isn't it. And thanks to Ryan for coming back on the show to talk about the Tritons and the narrats with me. They're just fascinating creatures and gods. There's just so many odd and interesting things to find within them. I love that there's like not this traditional idea of mermaids in Greek myth. Meanwhile, like mermn dudes get to be bottom half fish, no problem. Even if Triton has a singular character is often a pretty bad dude. But the sea, you know, it's messy and we have to love it. You follow Ryan on Twitter, not least because his handle is Sea monster Guy. I've linked to it in the episode's description. As always, Let's talk about Myth's Baby is written and produced by me Live Albert MICHAELA. Smith is the hermes to my Olympians and handles so many podcasts related things, from running the YouTube, to creating promotional images and videos, to editing and research, and so much more. Stephanie Foley works to transcribe the podcast for YouTube captions and accessibility. The podcast is hosted and monetized by iHeartMedia. Help me continue bringing you the world of Greek mythology and the Ancient Mediterranean. By becoming a patron, we'll get bonus episodes and more. Visit patreon dot com, slash myts baby, or click the link in this episode's description. I am moving Gods. I love the sea and this shit generally