THE HISTORY OF POSEIDON

 Mother Earth and Father Heaven (Gaea and Ouranos) had many children. They were the Fifty Headed Children, the Cyclops, the Titans, the Erynies and finally, the most monstrous of all, Typhon. Two of the Titans, Cronus and Rhea, also had many children. Cronus thought that one day, one of his children would dethrone him. As one child was born, he swallowed it. Rhea succeedingly send her sixth child to Crete, and gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes. Cronus thinking that the stone was his child, he swallowed the stone and soon after vomited all his other five full - grown children. When his sixth child came back from Crete, a terrible war began between Cronus, helped by his brother Titans, against his sixth child, along with his five brothers and sisters. Cronus and his brother Titans lost and were terribly punished.

The children of Rhea and Cronus were called Olympians. One of the six Olympians was Poseidon. The other five Olympians were his siblings, and they were Hades, Vesta, Demeter, Hera, and Zeus.

Poseidon and his brothers Hades and Zeus drew slots for shares of the World.  Zeus won the slot for the Earth and Heavens, Hades won the slot for the Underworld, and Poseidon got the slot for the Sea.

In the early times, Mother Earth (Gaea) had an affair with Pontus, the Sea. Together they had a child, Nereus, who became the sea god. In numerous Myths, he was described as being old with a long beard and a fishtail. He was the father of fifty sea nymphs, the lovely Nereids. When Poseidon, the Olympian, came to take over the kingdom of the seas, kind old Nereus gave him his daughter Amphitrite for his queen and a trident, a three-pronged staff, made for him by the Cyclops. Soon after that, he retired to an underwater cave. He gave the new king (Poseidon) and queen (Amphitrite) his palace at the bottom of the sea. It was made of the palest gold and lay in a garden of corals and shimmering pearls. There, Amphitrite lived contentedly surrounded by her forty-nine Nereid sisters. She had an only son, whose name was Triton. He had a fishtail instead of legs, like his grandfather Nereus, and rode about on the back of a sea monster, trumpeting on a conch shell.