“Drawn by Report to see the strange Amour Admiring Nations crowded to the Shore. Rapt with delight, surveyed their am’rous Game And owned the Sight superior to the Fame.”
But alas! soon was “their am’rous Game” to end.
One day the lad, tired and eager for a bathe, threw himself on his comrade’s back, only however to impale himself on the dorsal spike and gradually bleed to death. No sooner did the Dolphin perceive the water tinged with blood, than “with the force of a full-sailed Rhodian ship,” he drave straight for land, flung himself and his burden high and dry on the strand, and there, by the side of his beloved dead, abode until death came unto him also.
To testify that these twain “were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided,” the citizens of Iasos erected a monument, showing the beautiful boy astride the back of the Dolphin, and issued coins bearing the effigies of each, which were sought far as souvenirs by bands of pilgrims attracted thither by the story. In such regard did the legend continue to be held that even up to the third century b.c. the Iasians struck coins with the device of a youth swimming beside a dolphin, which he clasps with one arm.[212]
Like Scylla, who “fishes for dolphins and whatso greater beast she may anywhere take,” both the Thracians and Byzantines, despite the enormous annual revenues derived by the latter from their fisheries, caught and ate the Dolphin, and for so-doing are branded as impious and barbarian.[213] The more ancient Byzantine coins show a cow standing on a dolphin, which perhaps symbolises the heifer crossing the Bosporus.[214]
THE DOLPHIN AND
THE BOY OF IASOS.
From Coin, British Museum,
Cat. Pl. 21. 7.
The ancient literature of the East also portrays Dolphins (Ç i çumâras) as the ready helpers of man, in rescuing lives, in drawing ships, etc.[215] The inhabitants of Isle Sainte Marie, near Madagascar, even now never harm or eat the fish, holding it as sacred, because they believe it rendered signal service to some ancestor.[216]