Neptune [1] heard the tumult

Reared his awful head above the sea

Sensed His sister's envious fury

Her wicked aims and arts He well knew

*

He summoned King Wind

Rebuked him for a rebel [2]

Lashed him in

Banished him to his troubled cave again

*

Claimed Neptune Ocean and Air

By fatal lot to He [3] liquid empire fell and

By His trident of the sea He confined

King Wind as shackler of the wind

*

Hoarse commands he gusted

And while he spoke He smoothed the sea

Dispelled the darkness

And day-lit the sea

*

Triton, and the sea-green nymphs

His Daughters of the Deep

Freed the rock-bound ships

With their beauteous grips

*

As a mob of punks cowed subsides

So did the screaming tempest

The seething tides

The Deep come to weary rest

*

Neptune risen

Like a grave and pious man

The mob of winds and swells listen

Their bloodthirst quiet in the shadow of his spear

*

End 4

*

Notes:

-1. Poseidon, “Breaker of Horses,” patron of Hector of Troy, an earlier Arуan sky god than Zeus [Thunder-chief] and his Roman version Jupiter or Jove.

-2. Such cataclysmic myths demonstrate that, in the ancient view, nature does not in its normal course threaten humanity with such destruction, as in the tales of Gilgamesh and Noah. Disaster on such scale is represented by the evil work of a deity, generally of the jealous sort.

-3. As the ancient tribes who brought the worship of Horse Breaker [Poseidon/Neptune] to the a Middle Sea were harried in their turns by the tribes under Thunder-chief [Zeus/Jove], then Sun-chariot [Apollo, possibly a conflation of a handful of skygods] and finally Kantor [the Centaur deity, perhaps representing the coming of actual horse-riders rather than charioteers] it may be that the earliest horse clan god was recognized as lord of the seas, not as a demotion by a more powerful sky god, but due to the taking of his people to a life of maritime nomadism and piracy under pressure from successive tribes of horse clans. It is certain that a group of “Sea Peoples” also had a hand in toppling the Bronze Age chariot empires, a happening reflected in The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Argonautica and very likely this epic. These Sea Peoples are also represented by the Philistines in the Old Testament.