The hippocampus, or hippocamp, (plural: hippocampi or hippocamps; hippókampos, from , and [ Word origin of Hippocampus at reference.com; compare the monster Campe.]) is a mythological creature mentioned in Etruscan, Greek mythology, ,[Israel Antiquities Authority, Yizre'el Valley silver hoard (retrieved Jan 10 2013)] Picts and Roman mythology (though its name has a clear Greek origin), typically depicted as having the upper body of a horse with the lower body of a fish.
Mythology
Coins minted at Tyre around the 4th century BC show the
Tutelary deity Melqart riding on a winged hippocampus, accompanied by
.
Coins of the same period from
Byblos show a hippocampus diving under a
galley.
[ Stater of Byblos with galley | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston][ Byblos at NumisBids]
A gold hippocamp was discovered in a hoard from the kingdom of Lydia, Anatolia, dating to the 6th century BC.[Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World, Chapter 6; excerpt in Smithsonian, Nov. 14, 2008 (retrieved Jan 10 2013).]
Greek and Roman
In the
Iliad,
Homer describes
Poseidon—god of horses, earthquakes and oceans—driving a
chariot drawn by
brass-hoofed horses over the ocean's surface.
[Homer, Iliad xiii. 24, 29;] Similarly, Apollonius of Rhodes describes the horse of Poseidon as emerging from the sea and galloping across the
sands.
[Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica (iv.1353ff)] This compares to the specifically "two (
Cloven hoof)-hoofed" hippocampi of Gaius Valerius Flaccus in his
Argonautica: "Orion, when grasping his father's
, heaves the sea with the snorting of his two-hooved horses."
[Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 2.507.] In Hellenistic and
Roman Empire imagery, however, Poseidon often drives a "sea-chariot", drawn by hippocampi. Thus, hippocampi sport with this god in both ancient depictions and much more modern ones, such as in the waters of the 18th-century
Trevi Fountain in Rome, as surveyed by Neptune from his niche above.
The appearance of hippocampi in both freshwater and seawater is counterintuitive to a modern audience, though not to an ancient one, as the Greek concept of the natural Water cycle did not take into account the condensation of atmospheric water as precipitation to replenish the water table, but rather imagined the waters of the sea flowing back onto land through vast and , rising replenished and freshened in springs.[This made credible the mythic undersea passage of the fountain nymph Arethusa from Greece to Sicily. The summary given of the ancients' view of the hydrological cycle is outlined by the Roman Epicurean Lucretius' De rerum natura (vi.631-38).]
Thus, it was natural for a temple at Helike, in the coastal plain of Achaea, to be dedicated to Poseidon Helikonios, or "the Poseidon of Helicon", the sacred spring of Mount Helicon.[Strabo: "The sea was raised by an earthquake and it submerged Helike and also the temple of Poseidon Helikonios..." ( Geography 8.7.2).] When an earthquake suddenly submerged the city, the temple's bronze Poseidon, accompanied by hippocampi, continued to snag fishermens' nets.[According to Eratosthenes, noted by Strabo ( loc. cit.).] Likewise, the hippocampus was considered an appropriate decoration for in Roman thermae and Public bathing, such as that seen at Aquae Sulis, in modern-day Bath, England (Roman Britain).
Poseidon's horses, which were included in the elaborate sculptural program of Ormolu and ivory added by a Roman client to the temple of Poseidon at Corinth, are likely to have been hippocampi; later on, the Romanised-Greek geographer Pausanias described the rich ensemble in the 2nd century AD ( Geography of Greece ii.1.7-.8):
Etruscan
Hippocampi appear with the first Oriental phase of Etruscan civilization: they remain a theme in Etruscan tomb wall-paintings and reliefs,
[Etruscan sea creatures, including a range of hippocampi, are set in cultural context and ordered by typology in Monika Boosen, Etruskische Meeresmischwesen: Untersuchungen zur Typologie u. Bedeutung ( Archaeologica 59) (Rome:Bretschneider) 1986.] where they are sometimes provided with wings, as they are in the Trevi Fountain. Katharine Shepard found in the theme an Etruscan belief in a sea-voyage to the other world.
[Katharine Shepard, The Fish-Tailed Monster in Greek and Etruscan Art, 1940, pp 25ff; the thesis was, exceptionally, reviewed (by G.W. Elderkin) in American Journal of Archaeology 45.2 (April 1941), pp. 307-308: available on-line through JSTOR.]
Medieval, Renaissance, and modern
The mythic hippocampus has been used as a heraldic charge, particularly since the Renaissance, most often in the armorial bearings of people and places with maritime associations. However, in a
blazon, the terms
hippocamp and
hippocampus now refer to the real animal called a
seahorse, and the terms
seahorse and
sea-horse refer to the mythological creature. The above-mentioned fish hybrids are seen less frequently. In appearance, the heraldic sea-horse is depicted as having the head and neck of a horse, the tail of a fish and webbed paws replacing its front hooves. Its mane may be that of a horse or it may be replaced with an additional fin. Sea-horses may be depicted with wings, and winged sea-horses with a horn were part of the armorial bearings granted to Sir
Sean Connery in 2018 by the Lord Lyon King of Arms, the head of Scotland's heraldic authority.
[Arthur Charles Fox-Davies. A Complete Guide to Heraldry
]
/ref>
The sea-horse is also a common image in Renaissance and Baroque art, for example, in the Trevi Fountain, dating to 1732.
A winged hippocampus has been used as a symbol for Air France since its establishment in 1933 (inherited from its predecessor Air Orient); it appears today on the engine of Air France aircraft.
Bronze hippocampi appear in Dublin, Leinster, Ireland on lampposts next to a statue of Henry Grattan and on Grattan Bridge.
The English football club Newcastle United has two hippocampi depicted on its crest. They appear to the left and right of the shield in the middle. The Civic Centre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne is also adorned with hippocampi at the top of its central tower.
Capricornus and related mythical animals
Closely related to the hippocampus is the "sea goat", represented by Capricorn, a mythical creature with the front half of a goat and the rear half of a fish. Canonical figures, most of which were not themselves , and coins of the goddess associated with Aphrodite as the Aphrodisias through interpretatio graeca, show the goddess riding on a sea-goat.[Imhoof-Blümer, Kleinasiatische Müntzen plate IV, no 14, noted in Elderkin 1941:307] Brody describes her thus:[Lisa R. Brody, under the direction of Christopher Ratté, "The Iconography and Cult of the Aphrodite of Aphrodisias" (dead link- archive version here), New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1999. ( google books link)]
Aside from aigikampoi, the fish-tailed goats representing Capricorn,[See Boosen 1986.]
The combination of a horse and a fish was also evoked in the concept of an Ichthyocentaur, which replaced the head and neck of the horse portion with the upper body of a man, akin instead to the more widespread hippocentaur. Icthyocentaurs appeared in ancient visual art from the 2nd century BC onward, though the name was not coined until the Middle Ages.
Astronomy
A small moon of Neptune, discovered in July 2013, was named for the mythological creature in February 2019.[ Scientists reveal Neptune's tiny new moon, Hippocamp]
See also
Notes
Sources
-
Classical references: Homer, Iliad xlii. 24, 29; Euripides, Andromache 1012; Virgil Georgics iv. 389; Philostratus Imagines i. 8; Statius Thebaid ii. 45 and Achilleid 1.25.
External links
