female, are sacrificed for the Sun and Earth. The group of Zeus, Ge, and Helius as
witnesses to oaths and other official business is widely attested in Greek inscriptions.
Although Helius was invoked in oaths, occasionally cited as an ancestor (particu-
larly in myths connected with Corinth) and recognized everywhere as divine, worship
of the Sun was limited among the classical Greeks (cf. Chapter 13), who tended to
attribute purely astral cults to the barbarians (Aristophanes,Peace410). Helius began
to be syncretized with Apollo as early as the fifth century in Orphic speculation, but
the widespread identification of Apollo as sun-god was a later phenomenon. Just as
Ge at Delphi was considered a primordial deity who yielded to Apollo, Helius was the
original possessor of the Acrocorinthus, the citadel of Corinth, but gave the land to
Aphrodite (Pausanias 2.4.7). The scattering of minor cults in the Peloponnese
(Sicyon, Argos, Hermione, Epidaurus, Mount Taleton in Laconia) and the holy flocks
of Helius at Taenarum mentioned in theHomeric Hymn to Apollo(410–13) suggest
that this worship was deeply rooted in Dorian Greece. Thus it may be that Helius’
cult was carried to Rhodes by Dorian settlers in the seventh century, though other
theories hold that the sun worship there was prehellenic in origin. Pindar’s seventh
Olympian ode (71–5) conveys the unique relationship between the Rhodians and
their patron god, who chose the island for himself and fathered the seven Heliadae to
whom the Rhodian elite traced their ancestry. With the founding of Rhodes city in
408 BC, the annual festival of the Heliaea drew athletes and musicians from around
the Greek world, and the cult gained even more fame when the 110-foot statue of
Helius known as the Colossus of Rhodes was erected in 282 BC.
Gods of the Sea and Wind
Epic makes of Poseidon a great lord of the sea, emerging from his palace under the
waves near Aegae to aid the Achaeans in battle, or rousing a storm to drown Odysseus
on his raft. But Poseidon himself is a complex Mycenaean deity whose origins lie
further inland; he is the Earth-Shaker, an ancestral god with ties to freshwater springs
and horses. Even in theIliad(13.10–30), the dominant image is that of Poseidon as a
charioteer, driving his golden-maned horses over the sea. He himself is not a per-
sonification of the sea, but its ruler. If Poseidon is a lord of elemental forces, his
Nereid consort Amphitrite is more closely identified in theOdysseywith the element
itself: she breeds many monsters (Odyssey5.417–22, 12.90) and the waves are hers
(Odyssey3.85, 12.55). Amphitrite is more than a literary invention; she often appears
in cultic contexts with Poseidon, as at Isthmia (Pausanias 2.1.7). An archaic votive
dump at Penteskouphia near Corinth yielded claypinakesdepicting Amphitrite with
smaller-sized worshipers, or riding in a chariot with Poseidon.
In Greek mythology, the gods who represent the sea share its unbounded nature as
the source of creatures formless and strange to human eyes. Monsters and shape-
shifters, the latter often possessed of prophetic powers, come from the sea. Nereus
and his congeners Proteus and Glaucus are Masters of Animals who control the
supply of fish and other marine animals. In Greek fishermen’s folklore, these Old
Men of the Sea were elusive shape-changers who could tell one’s fortune if captured.
In Greek religious practice, on the other hand, the overriding concern with regard to
the sea was safe travel. Many gods could be called upon to protect mariners, especially
68 Jennifer Larson