A lyrical retelling of Ancient Greece's most famous watery love-triangle

ATLAS 

The first time I saw her, she danced in the shallows of the Naxos coast with her sisters. They twirled together, delicate toes skimming the lilac waters, leaving behind them spirals of bubbles and froth. In the early morning sun, they swung their arms gracefully, limbs so supple and lithe they resembled freshly-grown almond tree branches. Her skin was the gleaming waters of the rockpools personified, her voice the trinkling cascade of the falls. 

Amphitrite, a sea nymph of Greece. And the woman whom I had hoped to marry.

I, Atlas, Titan of the waters before Poseidon took rule, was a being of sea-mist and adventure. I had skimmed the great ocean for eons and played fearlessly in the surf as an infant god. I was friends with the sea-birds and the turtles and the rays, living with them in harmony and joy as we watched the Earth going through its phases, and listened to the new gods wrestling up in the higher spheres. 

When in the water, I became a force much like the moon-dragged tide, in that I moved magnetically. The exception was that I was one-unto-myself and no moon could direct me. My magnetism was charged by my own will and I travelled wherever I wanted with ease. As an old king, I knew these waters well.

Every day I saw Amphitrite rocking back and forth at the water’s edge, rhythmic and always smiling, for she knew the pleasure of the tides. Never too deep, never too much, always shining. She was splendid and sparkling and smelled of salt, and I dwelled on her as the sky dwells on the sea – we were always close, but never close enough.

By the time I’d reached full maturity, I’d carved out an abode all of my own – Atlas Island, I liked to call it – and I’d beckon her over whenever I saw the chance. If she agreed, I’d soak her in the rainbows of my sea-mist and tickle her wrists with the dance of my kritamo. Our days were filled with idle pleasures and I was happy, but I wanted more. 

As I planned my proposal, I noticed the skies growing darker, the clouds flashing with embryonic lightning. I felt the swell of the waters change, growing longer in their pull, and every so often a flurry of square-waves would cross the bay, signalling turmoil further out. A storm was brewing and I knew that I wouldn’t have much time before Amphitrite would disappear. 

She could not stay during the storms. Her gentle existence got swallowed up with each tempest, the lashing vengefulness of an angry ocean proving too much for the gossamer essence of nymphs. She always returned to me afterwards, but this time I had wanted to offer her my question before she left, for I knew that I would have to wait, anguished, for her return. At least if I asked her the question first, I could endure the storm with some impetus.

So, for the marriage proposal, I collected rare alabaster pearls from the scallops that lined the beds of the warm Ionian Sea, pearls that shared kin with Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty herself. I swept through the Aegean Sea next, forming bouquets of the most radiant corals. Along Ithaca’s shores I took up all of the treasures, gold and jewels, that had famously fallen from human ships and been lost to the waves. Each of these marvels I brought back to my cove, arranging them to create a seat of paradise, a thing of beauty, suitable for only the most exquisite of nymphs.

The storm bulged overhead and I felt the accumulation of electricity mottle the airwaves. I emerged from the sea in my human form: a young man, shoulder-length hair dripping black with water, my eyes the shade of Greece’s lagoons. I waited for her on the shore, with all that I could offer propped up beside me. 

Like the raindrops that merge seamlessly into the ocean, she knew I was there – she could feel me on her skin, even when she paddled far away. I waited and she came as the fragrant breeze of summer comes, gentle and warm and bright. Locks like the purest sand, she emerged from the foam, her eyes as stormy as the sky behind her. She was vivid against the brooding back-drop, scintillating. My beacon in all of this.

I said the words, and she smiled. It was a pretty, giggly smile, which lit up her eyes with the ethereal glow of bioluminescent algae. The sky opened above her, then – I saw with my divine eyes the very moment of its bursting – and then she was gone, dissolved into the black waves, having not formed a single word in reply to my question.

POSEIDON

A female of shimmy and bounce, the Nereid Amphitrite outshone her collection of sisters, making the loins of every male - god or mortal - twist in anticipation with nothing more than her dance and her smile. It was while watching the nymphs twirl in the low tides of the Naxos isles that I had fallen in love with her and decided to sweep her out to me. I ruled the kingdom of the sea, the mightiest force on Earth, in equality with the skies and the Underworld, which were ruled by my brothers Zeus and Hades, and no woman could resist me. She could not refuse me, even if she tried.

I had seen the naïve spirit of sea-spray, Atlas, fumbling about her and coaxing her away to his meagre cove. She had humoured him, but I knew that a woman of her quality would be much better suited to a man of pride and power. So fair was she, and so deep my waters, so large my kingdom. Atlas had done his best, and I appreciate a man who strives for that which is beyond him, but he would lose in this contest of conquest in which his mammoth rival was me, great beast of the sea as I am. He once ruled my kingdom as a second-generation Titan, but no more.

My father, Cronus, god of time, was cast away to Tartarus for eternity, overthrown by we three brothers, and Amphitrite would know of this story. She would know me the moment her eyes fell upon the famous mighty Poseidon. My three-speared weapon, the trident, was legend, a gift from the savage Cyclopes whom we’d freed from the depths of the pit. All who behold the trident tremble, and I planned to use it to make Amphitrite shake too. Such a potent weapon, it could conjure up ferocious storms over the surface of the sea and crack open earthquakes in the bedrock beneath it. When my scheme to haul her to me with the strength of my waves was foiled, as a consequence of her feeble nature, I devised a new ploy. 

The creatures of water were mine to command and I knew that no animal could please a woman like the dolphin. I clicked out the call, my barnacle-laden fingers holding my lips and tongue in a way that allowed my human form to mimic their cry, and with the speed of a blazing comet, the ocean’s finest dolphin arrived at the door of my inky sea-bed cave. I told it to swim to her and command her to ride its slippery fin back to me, or else I would smash her friend Atlas the way I could smash her and her sisters. The creature sped off and I awaited the arrival of my soon-to-be-wife. I would offer her nothing more than a seat at my side, and she would not refuse. 

AMPHITRITE

The life of a nymph is…shallow. They watch us dance and leap and curtsey, and they clap their rubbery fins and throw to us petals. More, more! they call. Oh, did you see the sisters this evening? Their bubbling frolics almost outshone the stars.

Eugh, it makes me sick. The whole world desires beauty, unless you already have it - then you desire power. But where can a nymph find power, outside of dance and matters of sensuality? I wanted to rule; I wanted conquer; I wanted to part the seas. But I was made to toddle in the shallows, to roll in the silvery ripples, to lap and gyrate against the smooth pebbles of the shore with my pearly teeth on show for them all. Oh, isn’t she serene? 

They see what they want to see.

We are not bubbles filled with air. Nymphs are the culmination of water, earth and sunlight. We shine, we stride, we swim like no other. Who else can balance all three realms so well? Not the gods, that’s for sure. Nymphs do not have wars; we do not fight. We dance and please and gossip. But we could do a lot more, if only we could leave our tidal pools.

Atlas was charming and likeable. He was fun, but he admired me too much for the things that I did not value in myself. Beauty, sweetness? Those things are fickle, and can be applied when they need to be. He was once a mighty king, Titan of the seas, but he failed to recognise my might. He just tripped over himself to flatter me and I found it pitiful. Offensive, even. I was glad when Poseidon turned me to drops, dissolved my body into the wine-dark waves, saving me from being forced to make my excuses and refuse Atlas’s proposal. 

While floating in the quiet spaces between the ocean’s debris, formless and almost without will, listening to the storm raging its wild winds above the surface, I encountered a dolphin. Its body was large and purple-blue, and it thrashed slightly as it moored in the choppy waves. I looked into the animals’ eyes - they were the colour of rock, but not vacant and cold as marble is; rather, kinetic and animated, like the solid formation of bedrock minerals layered over each other, and layering still. I asked it what it needed.

I need you to ride on my back, it clicked. I almost refused, but then it continued, to Poseidon.

Oh yes. I would go. 

I settled onto the dolphin’s fin and felt the force of Poseidon stretch around us in the water, pulling us out into the deep. My body returned to me as we travelled through the thick kelp forests, over ghostly seamounts, the layers of bone and skin forming in the magical waters until all of me was recollected and fully formed. I knew what was coming – did he think I did not? – and I gathered my wits about me, preparing to perform my nymphy tricks on the colossal god of the sea.

When we arrived, Poseidon was sitting on a throne which had been elegantly carved from the white sea stacks that were indigenous to Greece. Brooding and silent, he waited in the farthest corner of his salty cave. I slunk in, my golden hair swaying in time with my hips, my nimble ankles gliding slowly and intentionally through the dark halls, the delicate pads of my toes pressing tenderly against the cold tiles of his kingdom with each step. At last, he was before me, holding his prized trident massive and golden and chilling to see, but I did not waver. I knew his tricks. I did not think that he would guess mine.

“You will marry me” Poseidon boomed, his black sharks’ eyes boring down on me from up on his stage. I let the light fall from my eyes, held my face in my hands and twisted my legs, all on a stage of my own.

“No! Oh no! I love Atlas! Return me to him at once!” the words cawed from my thin throat as a seagull might hack up a bone. Poseidon’s face hardened, but there was a telling look in the way he set his jaw.

“I am mighty Poseidon of the raging sea; you dare refuse me for a…splash of spray?” his voice was not charged with the anger of true offense, as I knew it wouldn’t be. I cowered on the floor, pretending to be in agony, clutching at my stomach in a way that lifted my breasts. I saw him looking and feigned tears.

“Return me to Atlas at once!” I screamed. 

Poseidon lifted his trident and smashed it back on the ground. The weapon lit up, glowing with the intensity of a lightning bolt and illuminating the sea god with its searing metallic glare. This time, I detected true fury beneath his thick brows.

“Nymph, I have replaced Atlas as god of the ocean. I command all intelligence beneath the waves. Each grain of sand belongs to me, each curtain of seaweed, each node of coral. I own half the world and Atlas owns nothing but a small cove. Is he the only thing that keeps you from me?”

As he said the words, I knew that I had him. 

“Yes.” I whimpered, pulling my forehead into knots and pursing my lips as though an olive pip sat between my teeth. 

“Then he will die!” Poseidon roared, the sound of a thousand giant whirlpools sucking inside his lungs. I screamed again, howled, dug half-moons into my own forearms as my knees turned to water beneath me and I hit the floor. 

‘Please…” I begged, searching him. Something hard like flint flashed in his fishy eyes.

“Actually…” he said, standing up and holding the trident out to me, “take hold of the trident, nymph.”

Slowly, I clasped my hands upon weapon. He did not let go either. Together we held the magnificent golden shaft, its prongs spearing high above us both. This is what I had been hoping for. 

The ocean grew silent as the cold-blooded Poseidon stood straight and wide and tall in his cave, and the simple sea nymph crouched cunningly at his feet.

“You will be the one to kill Atlas.” The words left his mouth flat and void, as though he could not care less. I immediately felt the urgency of his will flow through the trident and, secretly ecstatic, I added my own. A rush pulsed from the weapon, sending an enormous invisible force through the cave walls and out into the sea. I knew that we’d created a tidal wave, huge and destructive, and that it was on its way to Atlas Island.

“Well done, Amphitrite. Atlas is vanquished by our combined will. Will you marry me now?” Poseidon sighed, his green beard flashing like the scales of an eel. 

There was a tenderness to his voice, one that was more veracious than I had been expecting. He was old and tired, I knew. Ruling was wearing him out. It didn’t matter that every water-way on the globe shuddered at the sound of his voice – all things lost their brilliance eventually. 

The sea would soon need a new ruler.

I felt the plop of Atlas as he dashed away from his cove, alive, having felt the tremor of warning I had sent to him through the skin of the sea. His actions of escape would have been but a subtle flick of the water to Poseidon’s overburdened aquatic sensors, easily mistaken by the Olympian for the flip of any fish’s tail in the whole of the vast Aegean. Only I and Atlas, connected as we were, would know the truth of his survival.

And just as sure as the treasures of Ithaca would find their way back to human hands, and just as sure as the future generations of scallop clams would one day reclaim their ancestors’ pearls, and just as sure as the coral would regrow again or else bleach itself out in silent vengeance, I would come to possess the power I was worthy of wielding. 

At Poseidon’s weary side, I would decide which ships sailed and which sunk, I would direct the migrations of the rays, I would question the octopuses and pull from their eight brains the secrets of the mysterious deep. I would conquer all who tried to conquer me. I would free my sisters, give them safe passage to any channel of their choosing. I would be queen of the great blue yonder. Then, and only then, would I go to seek out my Atlas, who hides in the spray of the rocks, waiting for me.

A woman of water simply cannot be defined by a male counterpart, whoever he may be, and I, Amphitrite, would leave my mark on this world the way I had always intended to.

Poseidon demanded an answer to his proposal, and I would damn well give it to him.

“Yes.” I said sweetly, smiling at the mighty sea god with all my pearly teeth on show.