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Ancient mythology typified the changing wonders of aquatic Nature, as well as the fickleness of the treacherous sea, in those shifting deities, Glaucus and Proteus, who tenanted the shore. The one the fancy of Ovid metamorphosed from a restless man to a fickle sea-god; the other assumed so many deceptive shapes to those who visited his cave, that his memory has been preserved in the word Protean.
Water is placed at the east end of the north stairway. The sea-god, with his trident in one hand and sea-weed in the other, rides on a wave, with a dolphin beside him. Fire at the west end of the north stairway-is typified by the figure of a man in agony, with one hand grasping the flame, and with jagged lightning in the other, symbolizing man's terror of fire as well as his conquering of it.
The rudder that groans, and the pilot compared to a sea-god, will not, I imagine, escape your criticism: for I perceive, while I am suing for indulgence to my former style, I have fallen into the same kind of figurative diction which you condemn.
The slander was believed, and Theseus prayed to his sire Poseidon to avenge the imagined wrong. So while Hippolytus drove in a chariot by the shore of the Saronic Gulf, the sea-god sent a fierce bull forth from the waves. The terrified horses bolted, threw Hippolytus from the chariot, and dragged him at their hoofs to death.
And they saw that the goddess, still merciful, was spinning; as a warning for Arachne, the pictures of her own triumph over reckless gods and mortals. In one corner of the web she made a story of her conquest over the sea-god Poseidon. For the first king of Athens had promised to dedicate the city to that god who should bestow upon it the most useful gift. Poseidon gave the horse.
Lord Carlisle, in his Diary in the Turkish and Greek Waters, thus speaks of Corfu, which he considers to be the ancient Phaeacian island: "The sites explain the Odyssey. The temple of the sea-god could not have been more fitly placed, upon a grassy platform of the most elastic turf, on the brow of a crag commanding harbor, and channel, and ocean.
What if there be another noble deed to be done before I see the sunny hills of Hellas?" So Perseus flew along the shore above the sea, and at the dawn of a day he looked towards the cliffs. At the water's edge, under a black rock, he saw a white image stand. "This," thought he, "must surely be the statue of some sea-god. I will go near and see."
The roar of this instrument could be heard for ten miles, for it was a magic shell, and when blown in battle it reproduced the cries of victory and shrieks of the dying; when blown to summon the people it was like the gale in the forest, and when it called a sea-god to listen to a prayer it was like surges thundering against the cliffs. That day was long remembered when the horn was stolen.
I looked like an Emir. Nor had my Viking neglected to follow my example; though with some few modifications of his own. With his long tangled hair and harpoon, he looked like the sea-god, that boards ships, for the first time crossing the Equator. For tatooed Samoa, he yet sported both kilt and turban, reminding one of a tawny leopard, though his spots were all in one place.
Who knows, perhaps through the clear water some green-eyed nymph, or a young sea-god with the tang of the sea in his hair, was peering amorously at the boy's red mouth. The people of the deep love the red warm blood of human kind. It is always the young that they lure to their watery haunts, never the shrivelled limbs that totter shivering to the grave.
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