Triton was a son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, a merman (man's torso, dolphin's tail) who served as his father's herald and trumpeter. He blew a great conch-shell horn which calmed the seas at his sounding, or whipped them up at his other will. The plural "Tritons" became, in late mythography and especially in art, a generic term for a whole class of male sea-divinities of similar form, who attended the marine deities' processions across the waves. Triton appeared in several heroic narratives: the Argonauts encountered him on the Libyan coast and received from him guidance and a clod of earth that became the island of Thera (the modern Santorini). His cult was modest, but his iconography is everywhere in Greek and Roman marine art.
Before thisProteus
Next on the wallGlaucus
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Hesiod, Theogony 930–933 (parentage); Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 4.1551–1619 (the Argonauts' encounter); Herodotus 4.179. The plural Tritons of the marine processions are a Hellenistic and Roman elaboration.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
Child ofPoseidonTriton was a son of Poseidon and Amphitrite
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for The Sea, the Wild and the Wind. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline
- c. 1600–1100 BCE
- Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
- c. 1100–800 BCE
- Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
- late 8th–7th centuries BCE
- The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
- 7th–6th centuries BCE
- Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
- 6th–5th centuries BCE
- Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
- 5th century BCE
- Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
- 4th century BCE
- Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
- 323–31 BCE
- Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.