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cast anchor there. Periander was overjoyed at his miraculous escape, and the dolphin, loth to part from Arion, insisted on accompanying him to court, where it soon succumbed to a life of luxury. Arion gave it a splendid funeral.
    When the ship docked, Periander sent for the captain and crew, whom he asked with pretended anxiety for news of Arion.
    ‘He has been delayed at Taenarus,’ the captain answered, ‘by the lavish hospitality of the inhabitants.’
    Periander made them all swear at the dolphin’s tomb that this was the truth, and then suddenly confronted them with Arion. Unable to deny their guilt, they were executed on the spot. Apollo later set the images of Arion and his lyre among the stars. 1
    c . Nor was Arion the first man to have been saved by a dolphin. A dolphin rescued Enalus when he leaped overboard to join his sweetheart Phineis who, in accordance with an oracle, had been chosen by lot and thrown into the sea to appease Amphitrite – for this was the expedition which the sons of Penthilus were leading to Lesbos as the island’s first colonists – and the dolphin’s mate rescued Phineis. Another dolphin saved Phalanthus from drowning in the Crisaean Sea on his way to Italy. Likewise Icadius, the Cretan brother of Iapys, when shipwrecked on a voyage to Italy, was guided by a dolphin to Delphi and gave the place its name; for the dolphin was Apollo in disguise. 2
1 . Herodotus: i. 24; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes xiii. 25; Hyginus: Fabula 194; Pausanias: iii. 25. 5.
2 . Plutarch: Banquet of the Seven Wise Men 20; Pausanias: x. 13. 5; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iii. 332.

    1 . Both Arion and Periander are historical characters of the seventh century B . C ., and a fragment of Arion’s Hymn to Poseidon survives. The story is perhaps based partly on a tradition that Arion’s songs attracted a school of dolphins and thus dissuaded some sailors from murdering him for his money – dolphins and seals are notoriously susceptible to music – partly on a misinterpretation of a statue which showed the god Palaemon, lyre in hand, arriving at Corinth on dolphin-back (see 70. 5 ). Mythic colour is lent to the story by making Arion a son of Poseidon, as was his namesake, the wild horse Arion (see 16. f ), and by giving his name to the Lyre constellation. Pausanias, a level-headed and truthful writer, doubts Herodotus’s hearsay story about Arion; but reports that he has seen with his own eyes the dolphin at Poroselene, which was mauled by fishermen, but had its wounds dressed by a boy, coming in answer to the boy’s call and gratefully allowing him to ride on its back (iii. 25. 5 ). This suggests that the ritual advent of the New Year Child was dramatically presented at Corinth with the aid of a tame dolphin trained by the Sun-priests.
    2 . The myth of Enalus and Phineis is probably deduced from an icon which showed Amphitrite and Triton riding on dolphins. Enalus is also associated by Plutarch with an octopus cult, and his name recalls that ofOedipus the Corinthian New Year Child (see 105. 1 ), whose counterpart he will have been at Mytilene, as Phalanthus was in Italy. Taras, a son of Poseidon by Minos’s daughter Satyraea (‘of the satyrs’), was the dolphin-riding New Year Child of Tarentum, which he is said to have founded, and where he had a hero shrine (Pausanias: x. 10. 4 and 13. 5; Strabo: vi. 3. 2); Phalanthus, the founder of Dorian Tarentum in 708 B . C ., took over the dolphin cult from the Cretanized Sicels whom he found there.
    3 . Icadius’s name, which means ‘twentieth’, is connected perhaps with the date of the month on which his advent was celebrated.

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