Neptune- Roman GodDeity"God of the Sea"

The Trident

Saturn's three sons divided the cosmos after overthrowing their father. The Cyclopes had forged a weapon for each: Jupiter's thunderbolt, Neptune's trident, Pluto's helm of invisibility. Jupiter took the sky. Pluto took the underworld. Neptune took the sea and everything in it.

The brothers were not equal. Jupiter ruled above them all, and Neptune did not forget it. Once, he conspired with Juno and Minerva to bind Jupiter and strip him of power. They would have succeeded, but the sea-nymph Thetis summoned Briareus, the hundred-handed giant, who sat beside Jupiter's throne and stared down the conspirators. Neptune withdrew. He kept his sea.

Quos Ego

In the Aeneid, Juno persuades Aeolus, keeper of the winds, to unleash a storm against Aeneas's fleet. The sea splits open. Ships scatter. Men drown.

Neptune rises from the deep. He has not been consulted. The winds have crossed into his domain without permission. He addresses them with two words: "Quos ego." He does not finish the sentence. He smooths the sea with a glance, lifts the ships from the rocks, and opens a path through the shallows with his trident.

The phrase became a Roman proverb. Two words and a silence, more frightening than any completed sentence.

The Horse from the Rock

Neptune struck a rock with his trident and the first horse leapt out. Roman mosaics show him riding a chariot pulled by hippocampi, creatures half horse and half fish, across open sea. On land, horse races honored him under his title Neptunus Equester. His shrine in the Circus Maximus stood among the turning posts, where charioteers prayed before the gates opened.

The Neptunalia

On July 23, at the driest point of summer, Romans built huts of branches near rivers and springs and feasted in them. This was the Neptunalia. The festival had nothing to do with the sea. It invoked Neptune as he had been before Rome became a maritime power: a god of freshwater, of the springs and rivers that kept crops alive when the heat turned fields to dust.

Varro lists the Neptunalia among Rome's oldest agricultural rites. No grand processions, no state priests. People gathered at the source of what they needed, and they ate and drank in the shade of branches they had cut that morning.