[2271] Being alarmed by the pursuit of the fish while he was swimming.
[2272] Athenæus, B. xiii., tells this story more at large, and states that the name of the child was Dionysius. Hardouin remarks, that Solinus, the ape of Pliny, has absolutely read this passage as though the child’s name had been Babylon; upon the strength of which, Saumaise had proposed to alter the reading in Pliny, not remembering at the time that the boy’s name had been given by Athenæus.
[2273] This story is also told by Plutarch, in his work on the Instincts of Animals.
[2274] Aulus Gellius, B. vii. c. 8, mentions this story, borrowing it probably from Theophrastus.
[2275] The people of the territory in which Amphilochian Argos was situate, and lying to the south of Ambracia. See B. iv. c. 2.
[2276] The people of Tarentum. See B. iii. c. 16.
[2277] Ovid tells the story of Arion more fully, and in beautiful language, in the Fasti, B. ii. l. 92, et seq.
[2278] A promontory in the south of Laconia, now Cape Matapan. See B. iv. c. 7. Solinus, c. 7, tells us that there was a temple of Arion of Methymna, situate on this spot, in which there was a figure of him seated on a dolphin’s back, and made of bronze; with an inscription stating that this wonderful circumstance took place in the 29th Olympiad, in which year Arion had been victorious in the Sicilian games. Philostorgius, in B. i. of his Ecclesiastical History, tells us also of a martyr who was saved by a dolphin, which bore him to Helenopolis, a city of Nicomedia.
[2279] Now Nismes. See B. iii. c. 5.
[2280] Still known as the Lake of Lattes, in the department of Narbonne. Cuvier says that the mullet-fishing is still carried on in this lake, which is on the shores of Languedoc, and refers to D’Astruc’s Memoirs on the Natural History of that province. The dolphins, however, he says, no longer take part in the sport; and he observes that the same story is told by Ælian, B. ii. c. 8, and Albertus Magnus, De Anim. B. xxiv., with reference to other places. Oppian, in his Halieutica, B. v., makes Eubœa the scene of these adventures, while Albertus Magnus speaks of the shores of Italy. Rondelet, in his Book on Fishes, says that it used to take place on the coasts of Spain, near Palamos. Cuvier suggests, with Belon and D’Astruc, that the story arose from the fact that the dolphins, while pursuing the shoals of mullets, sometimes drove them into the creeks and salt-water lakes on the coast; a fact which has been sometimes found to cause the fish to be caught in greater abundance.