In the legend of the minotaur, Theseus had promised his father, Aegeus, king of Athens, to change his black sail for a white one on his return from Crete, if he had been successful in slaying the half man half bull creature kept by King Minos of Crete in his labyrinth. He forgot to do this, and his distraught father, seeing the ship approach with a black sail precipitated himself into the sea off the 60 metre cliff face of Cape Sounion, giving the Aegean sea its name.
The temple of Poseidon (the second most important Greek deity after Zeus), seen here framing last July’s supermoon, is first mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, in which the god of the sea subjects Odysseus on his return journey from the Trojan war to all sorts of trials and tribulations. The first archaeological finds on the site are roughly a century younger than the supposed date when Homer wrote the oral legends o of the Trojan war around 800BCE. The original temple was probably destroyed by the Persian army in 480BC, during Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, shortly before his defeat by the Athenian navy at Salamis. The later temple whose ruins appear in the photo was built around forty years after the destruction of the original Archaic period edifice. It was finally destroyed over eight centuries later by the Roman emperor Aurelius in 399CE.
The temple held an important place in the worship of a maritime power, and sailors used to come and sacrifice to Poseidon before beginning a journey, in order to beg his protection and placate his possible fury. There was once a gilded bronze statue within the naos six metres high, probably bearing the trident which he used to stir up the fearsome storms that populate ancient Greek literature and history. These tempests left wrecks strewn on the sea floor that have proved a boon to modern archaeologists seeking to understand how past peoples actually lived.
There is a probable astronomical/astrological alignment built into the temple structure: as viewed from the front, the sun sets on the longest day of the year (summer solstice, June 21st) in the middle of the old volcanic caldera of the island of Patroklou. Only 15 of the original 34 Doric columns remain standing today, carved from local white marble, probably the metamorphosed remnants of limey oozes at the bottom of the Tethyan ocean, whose last remnant is in turn the Mediterranean sea, which the sacred space of the sea god overlooks. All hail the lord of the oceans and seas…..may he protect us wandering mariners voyaging on the great ocean of life…
Image credit: Constantine Emmanouilidi via EPOD
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