Triton

A son of Poseidon (lord of the Sea) and the Nereid, Amphitrite; represented as having the head and body of a man with the tail of a fish and using a conch shell as a trumpet.

When the Argonauts were stranded in Libya, on the shores of the Tritonian Lake, they set out a tripod as an offering to Apollon; Triton, in the guise of a young man, appeared to them and offered a clod of earth because he had no other gift to offer in that barren land; he then showed them the course they should take to reach the sea; the clod of earth would later prove to be the “seed” for an island that one of the Argonauts’ ancestors would populate and call Thera.

The tripod which was offered to Apollon was to remain in the precincts of the Tritonian lake until the Greeks came to reclaim it; at that time the Greeks were to establish one hundred settlements on the lake’s shores; the Libyans believed this prophecy to be true and, to avoid an influx of Greeks, hid the tripod so that it could never be recovered.

• Argonautika, book 4, lines 1537-1585 and 1755-1764
• Histories, book 4, chapter 179