Hippocampus (mythology)

Coins minted at Tyre around the 4th century BC show the patron god Melqart riding on a winged hippocampus, accompanied by dolphins.

[6] In the Iliad, Homer describes Poseidon (Roman: Neptune; god of horses, earthquakes and oceans) driving a chariot drawn by brazen-hoofed equids over the ocean's surface;[7] Apollonius of Rhodes describes the horse of Poseidon as emerging from the sea and galloping across the Libyan sands.

[8] This compares to the specifically "two (cloven)-hoofed" hippocampi of Gaius Valerius Flaccus in his Argonautica: "Orion[,] when grasping his father’s reins[,] heaves the sea with the snorting of his two-hooved horses.

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.

[11] When an earthquake suddenly submerged the city, the temple's bronze Poseidon, accompanied by hippocampi, continued to snag fishermens' nets.

Poseidon's horses, which were included in the elaborate sculptural program of gilt-bronze 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): On the temple, which is not very large, stand bronze Tritons.

[15] 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.

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.

Icthyocentaurs appeared in ancient visual art from the 2nd century onward, though the name was not coined until the Middle Ages.