Except, then, in his position as brother and copartner, Neptune is very feebly marked with the traditional character. Again, in no deity is the mere animal delight in sacrifice more strongly developed. By offerings, his menaced destruction of the Phæacian city seems to be averted. His pleasure in the sacrifice of bulls is specially recorded[378]: and his remarkable fondness for the Solyman mountains, and the Ethiopian quarter, is perhaps connected with the eminent liberality of that people at their altars.
One traditive note, however, we find upon him, when we regard him as god of the sea: and it is this, that he is provided with a Secondary. It seems as though it was felt, that he did not wholly satisfy the demands of the mere element: and accordingly a god simply elemental has been provided in the person of Nereus, who is the centre of the submarine court, and who appears never to quit the depths. Nereus is the element impersonated: Neptune is its sovereign, has not his origin in it, but comes to it from without.
Neither is his command over the waters quite exclusive. He can of course raise a storm at sea. He can break off fragments, as the sea does, from rocks upon the coast[379]: and he threatens to overwhelm the Phæacian city by this means[380]. In conjunction with his power over the sea, he can let loose the winds, and darken the sky. On the other hand, not Jupiter only, but Juno and Minerva, can use the sea independently of him, as an instrument of their designs.
Again, while not fully developed as the mere elemental sea-god, he has clinging to him certain traditions which it is very difficult to attach to any portion whatever of his general character. I do not find any key to his interest in Æneas, whom he rescues from Achilles: unless it may possibly be, that the gods, in the absence of any particular motive the other way, took a common interest in the descendants of their race, or of Jupiter as its head. Still less is it feasible to explain the legend of his service under Laomedon in company with Apollo, so as to place it in any clear relation to the other traditions respecting him. He has, again, a peculiar relation to the horse, for though a sea-god, he employs the animal to transport him to Troas; and it was he, who presented Xanthus and Balius to Peleus[381]. Again, he, in conjunction with Jupiter[382], conferred the gift of managing the horse on his descendant Antilochus.
In the legend of the Eighth Odyssey, he does not share the unbecoming laughter of the other deities at the ridiculous predicament and disgrace of Mars, but earnestly labours for his release, and actually becomes his security for the damages due[383]. What was the cause of this peculiar interest? It is difficult to conceive the aim of the Poet in this place. Some have suggested the comic effect[384] which he has produced by putting the petition in the mouth of Neptune, whose mere opinion that Mars would pay was valueless, inasmuch as he was far too powerful to be called to account by Vulcan for any thing which he might have said. It seems to me more likely that, as being, in the possible absence of Jupiter as well as the goddesses, the senior and gravest of the deities, he becomes the official guardian of Olympian decorum; and that he acts here as the proper person to find an escape from a dilemma which, while ludicrous, is also embarrassing, and requires poetically a solution.
Amphitrite, the wife of Neptune in the later mythology, is not so named in Homer, by whom she is but doubtfully personified. Yet there is, as it were, an anticipation of the union, in the passage where he tells us that she rears monster-fishes to do the will of Neptune. Or it may be meant here, that she is the wife of Nereus.
His relation to the Phœnicians.
The connection of Neptune with the sea naturally raises the question, whether the introduction of his worship into Greece can have been owed to the Phœnicians. For an auxiliary mark, we have the fact that Ino, of Phœnician extraction, is a strictly maritime deity[385],
νῦν δ’ ἁλὸς ἐν πελάγεσσι θεῶν ἐξέμμορε τιμῆς.
The very frequent intrigues of Neptune with women may be the mythical dress of the adventures of Phœnician sailors in this kind: such as that which is recounted[386] in the story of Eumæus. We may notice, too, that in the Iliad, he does not particularly love the Greeks, but simply hates the Trojans. He, with Jupiter, we are told, loved Antilochus[387]. Jupiter, no doubt, because he had a regard for him as a Greek: Neptune, plainly, because he was his descendant. And in this way perhaps we may best explain the connection between Neptune and some abode in the East, far away from his own domain. He is absent from the Assembly of the First Odyssey[388], among the Ethiopians: and he sees Ulysses, on his voyage homewards, from afar, namely off the Solyman mountains; with which we must suppose he had some permanent tie, as no special cause is stated for his having been there. It little accords with his character as a marine god: but it is in harmony with the view of him as belonging to the circle of the Phœnician traditions, that he should visit a nation, of which Homer, I believe, conceived as being but a little beyond Phœnicia.