Plung’d in the Waves, and untry’d Fins displayed,
No further Change relenting Bacchus wrought,
Nor have the Dolphins all the Man forgot;
The conscious Soul retains her former Thought.
The god of the golden trident who rules over the seas, Poseidon, would not have prospered in his wooing of Amphitrite if it had not been for the assistance of a dolphin, who apprized Poseidon of her hiding-place. For this service, as is well-known, Poseidon set the dolphin among the stars in the constellation which bears its name to this day.
It is interesting in this connection that in a modern Greek folktale from Zacynthos, Poseidon changes a hero who has fallen into the sea into a dolphin until such time as he should find a maiden ready to be his wife. After some time the dolphin rescues a shipwrecked king and his daughter, the princess by way of reward takes him for her husband, and the spell is broken (Bernhard Schmidt, Das Volksleben der Neugriechen, p. 135).
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 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.”