Pausanias, in the second century CE, records that the people of Tanagra in Boeotia had a Triton on display, and he describes it. He gives two local stories about how it was killed — one in which it was ambushed at a wine-bowl left on the shore and beheaded while drunk, another in which Dionysus fought it — and then he describes the body: green hair on the head, like marsh frogs in colour and thickness, with fine scales, gills behind the ears, a human nose, a broad mouth with animal teeth, blue-grey eyes, hands and fingers with the surface of a seashell, and a dolphin's tail in place of feet.
He adds that the one at Rome was smaller and less impressive than the Tanagran specimen. This is an ancient travel writer reporting a preserved marine curiosity as an object he examined, in the flat descriptive register of a naturalist, and it is one of the strangest passages in Greek literature. Whatever was on that plinth — a mummified marine mammal, a composite fake, something else — it was on public display and it was catalogued.
The herald
The mythological Triton is the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, and his function is announced in Hesiod: he lives with his mother and father in a golden house in the depths of the sea, a dread god. Ovid gives him the job everyone remembers — at the end of the flood, Neptune calls him up from the deep, shoulders overgrown with purple shellfish, and orders him to sound his conch, the hollow twisted shell that widens from the base, whose note is heard on both shores from the rising to the setting sun. He blows it, and the waters withdraw.
That is the whole of his equipment: a shell used as a horn, which is a real object and was really blown. Conch trumpets are attested archaeologically around the Mediterranean and far beyond, and the sound carries a long way over water.
He is also credited with the ability to calm or raise the sea with the same instrument, and Roman art shows him constantly in that role, leading the marine procession.
The one time he does something
In Apollonius' Argonautica, the Argo is stranded in Lake Tritonis in Libya, having been carried overland for twelve days across the desert on the crew's shoulders, and cannot find a way back to the sea. Orpheus tells them to dedicate the great tripod they are carrying to the local gods. Triton appears — first in the form of a young man named Eurypylus, who hands Jason a clod of earth as a guest-gift, then in his own shape — takes hold of the keel and guides the ship through the shallows to open water.
The clod matters. It is dropped into the sea by the crewman Euphemus and becomes the island of Thera (Santorini), from which, generations later, Cyrene in Libya was founded. Pindar tells the same story in the fourth Pythian. It is a foundation charter for a real Greek colony, delivered by a sea-god handing someone a handful of dirt.
Lake Tritonis was a real if variously located feature of ancient Libyan geography, probably a salt marsh in what is now Tunisia, and Herodotus discusses it. Athena was said in some traditions to have been born beside it, which is one explanation offered in antiquity for her epithet Tritogeneia — an epithet whose meaning was already obscure to Greek writers and remains unexplained.
Plural Tritons
By the classical period he is no longer one being. Tritones appear in the plural as a whole class of merman attendants in the marine thiasos, blowing conches, carrying Nereids, pulling chariots, and appearing on mosaics, sarcophagi, fountains and gems in enormous numbers. Some are given fish tails, some two tails, some horse forelegs, in which case they are hippocamps or ichthyocentaurs.
That pluralisation is the standard fate of Greek marine and rustic figures — it happened to Pan and to the satyrs too — and it happens because decorative art needs repeatable figures rather than individuals. The Triton became a design element.
Roman and later Europe kept him in exactly that role: Bernini's Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barberini, completed in 1643, shows him kneeling on a shell blowing a conch, and there are Tritons on fountains in half the capitals of Europe.
The Little Mermaid problem
Disney's 1989 film gives the name King Triton to the mermaid's father, a crowned sea-king with a trident. That is Poseidon's job and Poseidon's trident, assigned to Poseidon's son. The film's Triton is powerful, sovereign and paternal; the Greek one is a herald with a shell who answers to his father.
The confusion is now so general that "Triton" reads to most people as the ruler of the sea rather than as its announcer, and the shell has largely disappeared in favour of a trident. Hans Christian Andersen's original tale of 1837 has a sea king with no classical name at all, so the substitution belongs to the adaptation.
The moon, the mollusc and the newt
His name has done well in taxonomy and astronomy. Triton is the largest moon of Neptune, discovered by William Lassell in 1846 just seventeen days after the planet itself, and it is genuinely remarkable: it orbits backwards, which means it was captured rather than formed in place, it has a nitrogen atmosphere, and Voyager 2 photographed nitrogen geysers erupting from its south polar cap in 1989.
Triton and Charonia tritonis are names for the large marine gastropods whose shells are used as trumpets across the Pacific and Indian oceans — the actual instrument, named after the god who blows it. The newt genus Triturus and the French and Italian words for newt come from the same source. And tritium, the hydrogen isotope, is named from the Greek for "third" rather than from the god, which is a coincidence worth noting because it is frequently misexplained.
Tritons in the plural, and the sonnet that fixed him in English
Does he have children?
Pallas, a daughter, in one significant tradition: Athena was raised alongside her and killed her accidentally in a sparring match, which is offered as an explanation for the goddess's name Pallas Athena and for the Palladium image she made in her friend's likeness. Some sources make Triton her foster-father in that account. It is a minor tradition, reported by Apollodorus, and it competes with several other explanations of the epithet.
Is he the same as Proteus or Nereus?
No. All three are sea-figures of the older generation or its offspring, but their functions differ: Nereus is the truthful old man of the sea and father of the Nereids; Proteus is the shape-shifting herdsman of seals who must be held down to be made to prophesy, in Odyssey 4 and in Virgil's Georgics; Triton is a herald with an instrument. The three get merged in later poetry and in Renaissance allegory, which treats them all as generic sea-elders.
Did Greeks depict merfolk generally?
Yes, and earlier than the Triton type: fish-tailed male figures appear in archaic Greek art, and the Near Eastern and Mesopotamian traditions have fish-bodied deities and apkallu figures well before that. The specifically female mermaid of European folklore is a much later composite, formed partly by the medieval merger of the fish-tailed body with the Sirens, who in Greece were birds.
Why is Wordsworth's Triton so famous?
Because of a sonnet. "The world is too much with us", written around 1802, ends with the poet wishing he were a pagan so that he might have glimpses that would make him less forlorn — "Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; / Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn." It is probably the single most quoted appearance of the god in English, and it uses him precisely as an emblem of a lost way of seeing nature.