CHAPTER II - MONUMENTS OF POSEIDON-CULT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
Summary
The monumental evidence, which always supplements the literary record of the higher Greek cults and often reveals religious facts that might otherwise have escaped our knowledge, is disappointingly meagre as regards Poseidon's worship. But though it may convey to us no new ideas serviceable for the history of this religion, it is useful as illustrating the prevalence of certain cult-concepts which the literature has brought to our notice.
The art-symbolism that attached to him was mainly intended to express the functions and character of the sea-divinity. But the ancient and independent aspect of him as the horse-god is attested by coins and other monuments of some antiquity. Besides those that have been already mentioned we can quote the early coin-device of Potidaia, the fifth-century coins of Rhaukos in Crete, with their fairly prevalent type of Poseidon Hippios, and their combination of the horse's head, trident, and dolphin (Coin Pl. A, 2); also certain sixth-century terracotta pinakes from Corinth in Berlin, on some of which Poseidon appears driving a chariot with Amphitrite, and on one as a horseman of rather diminutive figure (Pl. I a). And the monuments of the later Corinth that arose upon the ruins of the old were full of reminiscences of this traditional cultfigure, which has also inspired several representations of secular art.
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- The Cults of the Greek States , pp. 56 - 60Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010First published in: 1907