The cult of Apollo Delphinus was initiated, so legend has it, by Icadius who, leaving his native land of Lycia, which he had named for his mother, set out for Italy. Shipwrecked on the way, he was taken on the back of a dolphin, which set him down near Mount Parnassus, where he founded a temple to his father Apollo, and called the place Delphi after the dolphin. For this reason the dolphin became among the things most sacred to Apollo (Servius, Commentarii in Vergilii Aeneidos, III, 332; also Cornificius Longus, De Etymis Deorum).

Herodotos, writing of Periander (fl. 600 B.C.) tyrant of Corinth, tells one of the most famous of all stories of the dolphin (it is mentioned by Shakespeare in the first act of Twelfth Night). “In his time,” writes Herodotos (b. 484 B.C.), “a very wonderful thing is said to have happened. The Corinthians and the Lesbians agree in their account of the matter. They relate that Arion of Methymna, who, as a player on the lyre, was second to no man living at that time, and who was, so far as we know, the first to invent the dithyrambic measure, to give it its name, and to conduct in it at Corinth, was carried to Taenarum on the back of a dolphin.

“He had lived, it is said, at the court of Periander, when a longing came upon him to sail across to Italy and Sicily. Having made rich profits in those parts, he wanted to recross the seas to Corinth. He therefore hired a vessel, the crew of which were Corinthians, thinking that there was no people in whom he could more safely confide; and, going on board, he set sail from Tarentum. The sailors, however, when they reached the open sea, formed a plot to throw him overboard and seize upon his riches. Discovering their design, he fell on his knees, beseeching them to spare his life, and making them welcome to his money. But they refused; and required him either to kill himself outright, if he wished for a grave on the dry land, or without loss of time to leap overboard into the sea. In this strait Arion begged them, since such was their pleasure, to allow him to mount upon the quarter-deck, dressed in his full costume, and there to play and sing, and promising that, as soon as his song was ended, he would destroy himself. Delighted at the prospect of hearing the very best singer in the world, they consented, and withdrew from the stern to the middle of the vessel: while Arion dressed himself in the full costume of his calling, took his lyre, and standing on the quarter-deck, chanted the Orthian [a very high-pitched lively and spirited song]. His strain ended, he flung himself, fully attired as he was, headlong into the sea. The Corinthians then sailed on to Corinth. As for Arion, a dolphin, they say, took him upon his back and carried him to Taenarum, where he went ashore, and thence proceeded to Corinth in his musician’s dress, and told all that had happened to him. Periander, however, disbelieved the story, and put Arion in ward, to prevent his leaving Corinth, while he watched anxiously for the return of the mariners. On their arrival he summoned them before him and asked them if they could give him any tidings of Arion. They returned for answer that he was alive and in good health in Italy, and that they had left him at Tarentum, where he was doing well. Thereupon Arion appeared before them, just as he was when he jumped from the vessel: the men, astonished and detected in falsehood, could no longer deny their guilt. Such is the account which the Corinthians and Lesbians give; and there is to this day at Taenarum an offering of Arion’s at the shrine, which is a small figure in bronze, representing a man seated upon a dolphin.” (The History of Herodotus, Clio, I, 23-24.)

Commenting on this tale the poet Bianor, in The Greek Anthology (Declamatory Epigrams, 308), remarks, “So the sea presumably contains fish whose righteousness exceeds that of mankind.”

Coins of Methymna, in Lesbos, Arion’s birthplace, show him riding a dolphin. In one form or another the dolphin is represented on the coins of some forty Greek cities, and doubtless most Greeks knew the reason why.

Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History (IX, 8, 24-28), writes as follows:

“The dolphin is an animal that is not only friendly to mankind but is also a lover of music, and it can be charmed by singing in harmony, but particularly by the sound of the water-organ. It is not afraid of a human being as something strange to it, but comes to meet vessels at sea and sports and gambols round them, actually trying to race them and passing them even when under full sail. In the reign of the late lamented Augustus a dolphin that had been brought into the Lucrine Lake fell marvellously in love with a certain boy, a poor man’s son, who used to go from the Baiae district to school at Pozzuoli, because fairly often the lad when loitering about the place at noon called him to him by the name of Snubnose and coaxed him with bits of the bread he had with him for the journey,—I should be ashamed to tell the story were it not that it has been written about by Maecenas and Fabianus and Flavius Alfius and many others,—and when the boy called to it at whatever time of day, although it was concealed in hiding, it used to fly to him out of the depth, eat out of his hand, and let him mount on its back, sheathing as it were the prickles of its fin, and used to carry him when mounted right across the bay to Pozzuoli to school, bringing him back in similar manner, for several years, until the boy died of disease, and then it used to keep coming sorrowfully and like a mourner to the customary place, and itself also expired, quite undoubtedly from longing. Another dolphin in recent years at Hippo Diarrhytus on the coast of Africa similarly used to feed out of people’s hands and allow itself to be stroked, and play with swimmers and carry them on its back. The Governor of Africa, Flavianus, smeared it all over with perfume, and the novelty of the scent apparently put it to sleep: it floated lifelessly about, holding aloof from human intercourse for some months as if it had been driven away by insult; but afterwards it returned and was an object of wonder as before. The expense caused to their hosts by persons of official position who came to see it forced the people of Hippo to destroy it. Before these occurrences a similar story is told about a boy in the city of Iasus, with whom a dolphin was observed for a long time to be in love, and while eagerly following him to the shore when he was going away it grounded on the sand and expired; Alexander the Great made the boy head of the priesthood of Poseidon at Babylon, interpreting the dolphin’s affection as a sign of the deity’s favour. Hegesidemus writes that in the same city of Iasus another boy also, named Hermias, while riding across the sea in the same manner lost his life in the waves of a sudden storm, but was brought back to the shore, and the dolphin confessing itself the cause of his death did not return out to sea and expired on dry land. Theophrastus records that exactly the same thing occurred at Naupactos too. Indeed there are unlimited instances: the people of Amphilocus and Taranto tell the same stories about boys and dolphins; and these make it credible that also the skilled harper Arion, when at sea the sailors were getting ready to kill him with the intention of stealing the money he had made, succeeded in coaxing them to let him first play a turn on his harp, and the music attracted a school of dolphins, whereupon he dived into the sea and was taken up by one of them and carried ashore at Cape Matapan.”

A very similar but apparently quite independent account of these stories is given by the younger Pliny, in his Letters (IX, 23).

The elder Pliny then goes on to tell of the manner in which dolphins assist fishermen, which corresponds closely with the accounts given by recent observers of this cooperative activity between fishermen and dolphins. (For accounts of these see Antony Alpers, Dolphins, 146 sq.)

There are numerous other stories similar to those given by the Plinys from classical antiquity, but it is quite impossible to recount them here.[1] What they all have in common is the friendliness of the dolphin for human beings, their rescue of them when they were thrown into the sea, their playfulness, especially with children, and their interest in almost any sort of sound. All these traits came to be regarded as mythical by later and more sophisticated ages, and Usener (Die Sintfluthsagen) comments on the effect that the prevalence of these tales had even upon the scientific thought of antiquity, making it difficult for such thinkers as Aristotle to get away from the belief in the dolphin’s ability to carry a rider, and in its capacity for human feeling (Aristotle, History of Animals, 631a). But Aristotle was right and Herr Usener wrong. The delightful thing about most of these myths is that they all appear to be based on solid fact, and not on the fancies attributed to the original narrators. Another typical modern gloss by a highly sophisticated writer, biologically not unknowledgeable, Norman Douglas, is the following: Commenting on the delphic mythology, he writes, “From these and many other sources, we may gather that there was supposed to exist an obscure but powerful bond of affection between this animal and humanity, and that it was endowed with a certain kindheartedness and man-loving propensity. This is obviously not the case; the dolphin cares no more about us than cares the haddock. What is the origin of this belief? I conjecture that the beast was credited with these social sentiments out of what may be called poetic reciprocation. Mankind, loving the merry gambols and other endearing characteristics of the dolphin, which has a playful trick of escorting vessels for its own amusement, whose presence signified fair weather, and whose parental attachment to its offspring won their esteem—quite apart from its fabled, perhaps real, love of music or at least of noisy sounds—were pleased to invest it with feelings akin to their own. They were fond of the dolphin; what more natural and becoming than that the dolphin should be fond of them?” (Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology, p. 161.)

But Douglas was undisillusionedly wrong, and the dolphins are right, and so is the “mankind” that believed in their friendliness. Though pleased to see the dolphins play, it is to be regretted that Douglas did not mind his compass and his way, for:

In order to avoid any imputation that I may be attempting to play Euhemerus[2] to the dolphin’s tale, the facts may be allowed to speak for themselves—always remembering that facts never speak for themselves, but are at the mercy of their interpreters. All, then, that I am concerned to show here, by citing the contemporary evidence, is that, in essence, the so-called myths of the ancients were based on solid facts of observation and not, as has hitherto been supposed, on the imaginings of mythmakers.