Other more approachable deities were those of the eternal sea on whose borders were founded the opulent cities of the Syrian coast; the Egyptian cities that sent sparks of their ritual civilization to Greece; the Hellenic cities, hearths of clear fire that had fused all knowledge, giving it eternal form; Rome, mistress of the world; Carthage, famed for her audacious geographical discoveries, and Marseilles, which had made western Europe share in the civilization of the Greeks, scattering it along the lower coast from settlement to settlement, even to the Straits of Cadiz.

A brother of the Oceanides, the prudent Nereus, used to reign in the depths of the Mediterranean.  This son of Oceanus had a blue beard, green eyes, and bunches of sea rushes on his eyebrows and breast.  His fifty daughters, the Nereids, bore his orders across the waves or frolicked around the ships, splashing in the faces of the rowers the foam tossed up by their arms.  But the sons of Father Time, on conquering the giant, had reapportioned the world, determining its rulers by lot.  Zeus remained lord of the land, the obscure Hades, lord of the underworld, reigned in the Plutonic abysses, and Poseidon became master of the blue surfaces.

Nereus, the dispossessed monarch, fled to a cavern of the Hellenic sea in order to live the calm existence of the philosopher-counselor of mankind, and Poseidon installed himself in the mother-of-pearl palaces with his white steeds tossing helmets of bronze and manes of gold.

His amorous eyes were fixed on the fifty Mediterranean princesses, the Nereids, who took their names from the aspect of the waves—­the Blue, the Green, the Swift, the Gentle....  “Nymphs of the green abysses with faces fresh as a rosebud, fragrant virgins that took the forms of all the monsters of the deep,” sang the Orphic hymn on the Grecian shore.  And Poseidon singled out among them all the Nereid of the Foam, the white Amphitrite who refused to accept his love.

She knew about this new god.  The coasts were peopled with cyclops like Polyphemus, with frightful monsters born of the union of Olympian goddesses and simple mortals; but an obliging dolphin came and went, carrying messages between Poseidon and the Nereid, until, overwhelmed by the eloquence of this restless rover of the wave, Amphitrite agreed to become the wife of the god, and the Mediterranean appeared to take on still greater beauty.

She was the aurora that shows her rosy finger-tips through the immense cleft between sky and sea, the warm hour of midday that makes the waters drowsy under its robe of restless gold, the bifurcated tongue of foam that laps the two faces of the hissing prow, the aroma-laden breeze that like a virgin’s breath swells the sail, the compassionate kiss that lulls the drowned to rest, without wrath and without resistance, before sinking forever into the fathomless abyss.

Her husband—­Poseidon on the Greek coast and Neptune on the Latin—­on mounting his chariot, used to awaken the tempest.  The brazen-hoofed horses with their stamping would paw up the huge waves and swallow up the ships.  The tritons of his cortege would send forth from their white shells the bellowing blasts that snap off the masts like reeds.