This son of Oceanus had a blue beard, green eyes, and bunches of sea rushes on his eyebrows and breast.

His fifty daughters, the Nereids, bore his orders across the waves or frolicked around the ships, splashing in the faces of the rowers the foam tossed up by their arms.

But the sons of Father Time, on conquering the giant, had reapportioned the world, determining its rulers by lot.

Zeus remained lord of the land, the obscure Hades, lord of the underworld, reigned in the Plutonic abysses, and Poseidon became master of the blue surfaces.
Nereus, the dispossessed monarch, fled to a cavern of the Hellenic sea in order to live the calm existence of the philosopher-counselor of mankind, and Poseidon installed himself in the mother-of-pearl palaces with his white steeds tossing helmets of bronze and manes of gold.
His amorous eyes were fixed on the fifty Mediterranean princesses, the Nereids, who took their names from the aspect of the waves--the Blue, the Green, the Swift, the Gentle....

"Nymphs of the green abysses with faces fresh as a rosebud, fragrant virgins that took the forms of all the monsters of the deep," sang the Orphic hymn on the Grecian shore.
And Poseidon singled out among them all the Nereid of the Foam, the white Amphitrite who refused to accept his love.
She knew about this new god.