Poseidon's Creation of the Horse

At a Glance

Central figures: Poseidon, god of the sea and earthquakes; Athena, goddess of wisdom; and the people of Attica, who decided between them.
Setting: Ancient Greece, the region of Attica and the city that would bear Athena’s name; the contest takes place in divine time, witnessed by the gods of Olympus.
The turn: Poseidon strikes the ground with his trident and a horse springs from the earth; Athena plants an olive tree; the people must choose which gift serves them better.
The outcome: Athena’s olive tree is judged the greater gift, and she becomes patron of Athens; Poseidon loses the contest, but his horse remains in the world.
The legacy: The horse became a sacred animal of Poseidon, offered in sacrifice at his coastal rites, and the first horse - created by the strike of his trident - stood as evidence of his dominion over land as well as sea.

Poseidon drove his trident into the rock of the Acropolis. The ground cracked. From the fissure came a horse - the first horse, wild-eyed, flanks dark with the dust of the newly broken earth, pawing at the stone and breathing hard as if it had been running beneath the ground for an age and only now found the surface. The people of Attica stared. The sea-god stood back and let them look.

He was competing for something he wanted badly: the patronage of this city, the right to be its protector and its presiding god, the offerings and the temples and the prayers that would flow upward from generation to generation. Athena wanted the same thing. The people of Attica had been asked to judge, and both gods had come to the rock above the city to show what they could give.

The Strike of the Trident

The trident was Poseidon’s instrument the way the thunderbolt was Zeus’s - the tool by which he shaped the world. With it he stirred up storms and calmed them, raised new islands from the seafloor, and cracked the land along fault lines that shook whole cities into rubble. When he drove it into the Acropolis rock, the crack that opened was no ordinary spring. Something came up with the water.

The horse that emerged was a creature of contradictions: powerful enough to carry a man into battle, fast enough to outrun every other animal, but wild, ungoverned, its eyes rolling with a speed and energy that no harness had yet contained. Poseidon’s argument was plain. He was offering Athens the most formidable animal in the world. With horses, armies moved faster than armies on foot. With horses, messengers crossed the country in days not weeks. With horses, the city could project force across Hellas and bring goods back along the same roads. Poseidon looked at the creature and considered the case won.

Athena’s Olive Tree

Athena did not strike the ground. She knelt and pressed a small shoot into the cracked earth of the Acropolis, and it grew - an olive tree, grey-green and deep-rooted, unremarkable in appearance next to the snorting first horse still trembling on the stone.

The olive tree offered nothing dramatic. What it offered was oil for lamps, timber for ships and rooftops, fruit to eat and to press, trade goods that could be exchanged all across the Mediterranean. It offered shade. It did not die in drought the way grain did. It produced for centuries without replanting. It demanded patience, but it repaid patience.

The people of Attica deliberated, and they chose the olive tree. Athena became patron of the city that took her name. The rock of the Acropolis where both gifts appeared remained sacred ground, and her temple would eventually rise there, with the olive tree beside it.

Poseidon’s Other Attempt - and Demeter

What the contest at Athens did not exhaust was Poseidon’s capacity to create. There is another version of the horse’s origin, older or at least differently aimed, in which it was not competition with Athena that drove him but desire for Demeter. He wanted her and she refused him. He followed her. She hid herself in the form of a mare among a herd of horses, hoping he would not find her. He did find her, took the form of a stallion himself, and from that union came the horse Arion - black-maned, faster than any other horse that had run across the earth, one of his hooves shining silver. Arion would later belong to the hero Adrastus, who rode him out alive from the catastrophe at Thebes when every other champion died.

The two stories - the contest with Athena, the pursuit of Demeter - do not so much contradict each other as circle the same fact about Poseidon: that his power expressed itself through the earth as much as through the sea, and that the horse was the truest emblem of it.

Horses Sacred to the God of the Sea

That a sea-god should rule horses seems strange until you consider what Greek sailors heard at night when the waves struck rock in the dark: a deep, rhythmic shuddering, something between a hoofbeat and a pulse. Poseidon was the Earth-Shaker, Enosichthon - the one who makes the ground tremble - and horses were his living signature on land, carrying that same trembling energy in their muscles and their stride.

In coastal cities, horses were driven into the sea as sacrifices to Poseidon. The rite was not symbolic in the way later readers have made it: it was transactional. The horse - the most valuable animal a man could own - was returned to the god who created it, thrown back into the element that had produced it, drowned in the surf so that Poseidon would be satisfied and the sea would stay passable. Fishermen and sailors understood what they owed him. The horse was currency in a negotiation that never fully closed.

Horses were bound up with the entire competitive life of Greece: the chariot races at the great festivals, the hippodrome where men and teams trained for years, the cavalry units that decided battles in the open field. Achilles’s divine horses, Xanthos and Balios, were the gift of Poseidon to Peleus; when Achilles died, the horses wept at the edge of the Greek camp in a way no animal should have been able to weep. The god’s creation carried grief as well as speed.

What the Horse Left Behind

Athena won Athens. That much is settled and was settled on the day of the contest, sealed when the people turned toward the olive tree and the city took the goddess’s name. Poseidon did not accept it quietly - he flooded the plain of Attica before the anger left him, and the flood-marks were visible for years in the low ground beyond the city walls.

But the horse was out. Nothing recalled it. It ran across Greece and across every land connected to Greece, and the men who rode it and harnessed it and raced it and sacrificed it never forgot that it had come from the crack in the rock on the Acropolis, from the dark beneath the earth, from the god who drove his trident down and split the ground open and let it out. Poseidon had lost the argument, and Athens was Athena’s city. The horse, though - the horse was everywhere.