The sea - at once barren and prosperity-bringing , loomed large and ambivalently in the Greek mind . Aside from the ebb and flow of piracy , sea-travel was fraught with superhuman hazard and uncertainty until the Industrial Revolution . It is impossible to assess the spiritual crisis in Aegean culture 's relations with the sea 's dangers and the capacity of its divinities that must have been engendered by the tsunamis that accompanied the volcanic explosion and collapse of Thera , ca. 1650 &ndash; 1600 BCE . Can the sense of the sea and its deities have survived the cataclysm unchanged ? It seems unlikely . The sea could therefore stand as a powerful symbol of the unknown and otherworldly . Although many people thought about the sea and her depths , no one would enter the watery grave
Thera
Minoan eruption
Greek sea gods