Hippocampus

The sea off Cape Taenarum goes heavy and flat in the late afternoon, and it is there, in Statius, that the sea god brings his team home. In front their hooves come down on the sand and grip it. Behind, they are still swimming, tails working under the shallows, blotting out their own hoofprints as they go. That is the hippocampus in a single image: a horse coming out of the water and never quite leaving it.

The Greeks built the name out of two words, hippos and kampos, horse and sea monster, and the join in the word is the join in the animal. The front is a horse and an unarguable one, with the muzzle, the nostrils, the arched neck and the pricked ears of something bred to run. At the breast the horse stops. What continues is a fish, a long scaled body that coils and thickens and ends in flukes, and in the mosaics of the Roman provinces it is picked out in green and grey tesserae, with a crest of fin standing in for a mane and a fringe of webbing running down the legs. The ancients, who were not fools but who were working with what washed up, believed the little curled sea-horse that fishermen pulled out of the weed was the young of this thing. Give it a few years and enough sea, and it would grow into the animal that pulled the god.

Homer does not describe it. This matters, and the Greeks themselves noticed. In the Iliad, Poseidon harnesses his horses under the sea at Aegae and drives them over the waves, and they are bronze-hoofed and golden-maned and swift, and the axle of the bronze car does not get wet. They are horses. Nothing in the poem says otherwise. Centuries later, Philostratus stood in front of a painting in Naples and said the quiet part out loud: in Homer you are thinking of dry-land horses, but here it is hippocamps that draw the chariot, creatures with web-footed hoofs, good swimmers, blue-eyed, and in all respects like dolphins. The fish tail is not in the oldest poem. It grows on later, in the hands of the painters and the mosaicists, and the poets then follow the painters, which is the usual order of these things.

By the sixth century BC the animal was everywhere in Attic workshops. Poseidon rides one on a black-figure vase in the British Museum. Nereids ride them on red-figure pots, sidesaddle and unhurried, ferrying Achilles’ new armour out to Troy across a sea that gives them no trouble at all. Apulian painters gave some of them wings, which may be nothing more than a painter remembering that Poseidon fathered Pegasus and deciding that the sea deserved a winged horse of its own. One of the earliest surviving examples is not Greek at all but a gold ornament from a royal Lydian tomb, and by the fifth and fourth centuries the creature is common on pottery and coinage from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. The Romans then took it up with real enthusiasm. Poseidon’s team gallops across floor after floor at Ostia, Antioch, Zeugma, Sousse and Carthage, five hundred years of the same motif, laid in stone in the dining rooms of people who wanted the sea to be on their side.

It was never alone. The same imagination produced the fish-tailed lion, the fish-tailed bull, the fish-tailed leopard and the fish-tailed goat, and that last one went up into the sky as Capricorn. The sea, in this way of thinking, is not a different world so much as the same world with the back half changed.

There is no birth story. No mother, no forge, no god who made the first one. They are simply what horses are when they are made of water, and they belong to Poseidon the way waves belong to him, without any need for an origin. The nearest thing to a myth of their own comes from the Libyan desert, in Apollonius. The Argonauts are stranded miles inland, the ship beached on sand, the crew arguing over a riddle they cannot solve, and out of the sea comes a great horse, monstrous, its golden mane shaking off spray in showers, and then it is gone across the dunes at the speed of the wind. Peleus understands first. Amphitrite has unyoked her husband’s team, and the horse running loose is one of them. The Argonauts hoist the Argo onto their shoulders and carry her across the desert in the horse’s tracks, because a sea horse’s hoofprints can only lead back to the sea.

They turn up in odder places too. Strabo repeats a story from Eratosthenes about the drowned city of Helice, where a bronze Poseidon stood upright underwater in the strait with a hippocampus held in his outstretched hand, and the fishermen who worked that water hated it, because their nets kept catching on the god. Pausanias walked into the temple of Poseidon at Corinth and listed what he saw among the offerings: statues of Calm and of Sea, and a horse that from the breast onward was a sea monster.

The strangest evidence is Egyptian, and nobody has yet explained it. Three Twenty-Second Dynasty coffins, one of them the coffin of the temple singer Perenbast now at the Manchester Museum, carry a snake-tailed hippocampus painted on them. They date to roughly 900 BC, which puts them before Homer, let alone before the Greek painters who supposedly invented the creature. The rest of the Egyptian examples cluster centuries later, when Greek goods and Greek gods were flooding in and the borrowing is obvious. These three are early, and they sit there unaccounted for.

What can it do? It can swim faster than any ship, tow a bronze chariot over open water without breaking the surface, carry a goddess and stay sweet-tempered about it. It answers to a bit and a rein, and it answers to a trident used as a goad. What it cannot do is anything on its own. Poseidon’s power to shake the earth is his and not theirs, the storms are his, the earthquakes are his, and the hippocamps are the animals that pull the cart. They kill nobody. They are never hunted. They have no names, not one, in a mythology that named Arion and Xanthus and Pegasus and half the horses that ever bore a hero. Their only real limitation is the shoreline, and even that is negotiable for a few hoofbeats before the sand gives out.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hippocampus in Greek mythology?

The hippocampus is a sea creature with the head, neck, chest and forelegs of a horse and the long scaled tail of a fish. Its Greek name, hippokampos, joins the words for horse and sea monster. Hippocampi drew the chariot of Poseidon across the waves and served as mounts for the Nereids and other sea gods.

What pulls Poseidon’s chariot?

Poseidon’s chariot is drawn by hippocampi, in teams of two or four depending on the source. In the oldest account, Homer’s Iliad, the god harnesses ordinary bronze-hoofed horses that gallop over the sea without wetting the axle of his car. The fish tail appears later, first in art and then in the poets, so that by the Roman period Statius and Valerius Flaccus describe the team as fish-tailed swimmers.

Is a hippocampus the same as a kelpie or a seahorse?

No. A kelpie is a Scottish water horse that drowns the people who mount it, while the hippocampus is a docile draught animal of the Greek and Roman sea that harms no one. It is also not the small curled fish that now carries the name, although ancient writers believed that fish was the creature’s juvenile form.

Where do hippocampi appear in ancient art?

They appear on Athenian black-figure and red-figure vases from the sixth and fifth centuries BC, on Lydian goldwork, on Greek and Roman coins, and above all on Roman floor mosaics, where Poseidon’s sea-horse team was a favourite subject for five centuries at sites including Ostia, Antioch, Zeugma and Carthage. Pausanias also saw a hippocampus among the offerings in the temple of Poseidon at Corinth.

Are hippocampi dangerous to humans?

Not in themselves. No Greek or Roman myth records a hippocampus attacking, drowning or devouring anyone, which sets it apart from most of the sea’s other inhabitants. The danger it represents is indirect: where the hippocampi are, Poseidon is, and Poseidon was never a safe god to meet at sea.

Related Entries

Poseidon, Nereid, Thetis, Oceanus, Cetus, Scylla, Charybdis, Pegasus, Arion, Xanthus, Hippalectryon, Aegipan, Kelpie, Each Uisge, Nuckelavee