NAME:	Unnamed
SPECIES:	Dolphin
DATE:	Seventh century BC
LOCATION:	The Aegean Sea
SITUATION:	Rich singer robbed and thrown into the Mediterranean
WHO WAS SAVED:	Arion, legendary Greek musician
LEGACY:	Earliest story of a life-saving animal rescue, immortalized dolphins as human helpers

The myth of Arion and the dolphin is a well-known ancient Greek legend. It is perhaps the oldest surviving version of a tale that’s extremely common in folklore worldwide.

And yet, long-buried beneath layers of myth, this story may contain a few kernels of truth. Arion himself was probably a real person. The ancient writers Herodotus, Erasmus, and St. Augustine thought so, and he was presented as a real Greek poet by the nineteenth-century mythologist Thomas Bulfinch.

In his time, around the seventh century BC, Arion was considered one of the best poets and lyre players in Greece. He was famously credited with inventing the dithyramb, a type of chorus-based musical composition used in the worship of Dionysus. Arion was originally from Lesbos, but he taught and played in Corinth, where his artistic patron was the tyrant ruler Periander (who lived from 627 to 585 BC).

The story may also reflect some truths about dolphins. The ancient Greeks were experienced seafarers, and images of dolphins appear in their earliest artworks. Could it be that observed dolphin behavior, and even actual life-saving events, fed the excited myths that the ancient Greeks used to describe their god-infused world?

ARION’S ITALIAN TOUR ENDS IN TRAGEDY
As the story goes, Arion had just concluded a very successful and lucrative musical tour across Italy, even winning a high-profile contest in Sicily—a sort of classical age American Idol.

Now richer and more famous than ever, Arion was returning home on a Corinthian ship. Once at sea, however, Arion discovered that the crew meant to kill him and steal his money. Would this have happened to Kelly Clarkson? No! Arion pleaded with the mutinous men: He would give them all of his gold if only they’d spare his life. No go, choir boy, they said. They were from Corinth, too, and how could they get away with their crime if Arion remained alive to tell of it?

“Grant me, then, a last request,” Arion said, as Bulfinch’s rendition tells it. “Since nought will avail to save my life, that I may die, as I have lived, as becomes a bard. When I shall have sung my death song, and my harp-strings shall have ceased to vibrate, then I will bid farewell to life, and yield uncomplaining to my fate.”

Very noble, the crew probably sniggered, but why not? After all, if Elvis promised you one last song before you pushed him off the plank, wouldn’t that be worth hearing?

So Arion dressed in his minstrel garb, took up his lyre, and sang a heartbreaking ode in honor of Apollo, the patron of Delphi. When he finished, he dutifully jumped off the stern of the ship, and the nefarious crew left him to drown in their wake.

However, Arion’s beautiful music had drawn a group of admiring dolphins, and one of the dolphins hoisted Arion onto his back and swam with him all the way to shore at Taenarum. From there, Arion walked home across the countryside, full of gratitude and song, until he reached Corinth and told Periander, the king, of the sailors’ crime and the dolphin’s kindness.

No gullible rube—perhaps he’d known too many entertainers—Periander was immediately suspicious of Arion, and he put the musician under guard. When the Corinthian ship eventually arrived, the king had the crew brought before him. He questioned them about the missing lyre player. The crew rolled their eyes and said: Oh, Arion? That flake is still in Italy, living the life and soaking up the glory.

Then Arion jumped out from his hiding place, shocking the crew and unmasking their plot. Periander banished the men from Corinth forever, and Arion’s miraculous rescue was immortalized with a bronze monument in Taenarum.

DOLPHINS IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY
Dolphins swim prominently in a number of Greek myths. In particular, dolphins play transformative roles in famous stories related to Apollo and Dionysus. Since Arion was connected to both gods, this may explain why dolphins were the life-saving vehicle in his story, which emphasizes the Greek musician’s favored status.

Homer tells the story about how Apollo founded the temple at Delphi, which the Greeks considered the center or navel of the world. After killing the dragon who previously guarded the site, and after spending many years at sea (Greek stories are never short), Apollo turned himself into a dolphin and hijacked a Cretan ship. As a dolphin, the sun god ordered the terrified crew to become his priests in his Delphic temple, thus supplanting the old religion with a new (and improved) one.

In the Dionysus story, the god of wine and ecstasy was traveling in disguise on a pirate ship. Not knowing they had a god aboard, the pirates decided to sell Dionysus into slavery, and so they tied him to the mast. Bad move. Thus angered, Dionysus caused the wooden ship to sprout vines of ivy, driving the men mad, and as the crew dove overboard to escape, they were turned into dolphins.

These stories are often cited as reasons for the well-known Greek prohibition against killing dolphins. Not only were dolphins venerated by the Greeks and closely associated with these important gods, but the stories provided a mythic explanation of the animal: Dolphins were originally human. As the Greek poet Oppian wrote, “Diviner than the Dolphin is nothing yet created for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals.”

What else, after all, could explain why these social, seagoing mammals were so humanlike? The similarities were not lost on the Greeks. Dolphins breathe air, give birth to live young, nurture their young, and play with evident abandon. Dolphins are attracted to ships to jump in the bow waves (see page 267), and they chatter and “sing” in apparent communication. As we know from modern-day dolphins in captivity, they will willingly give rides to humans, and in the wild, dolphins even occasionally save drowning swimmers (see page 239).

Does Arion’s myth, then, reflect an accurate portrait of dolphin behavior? All it would take would be one real-life episode in which dolphins playing in a ship’s bow waves saved some everyday Greek sailor from drowning. Once this remarkable story made the rounds, ancient poets would naturally want to use, and preserve, the tale in mythic form, one that involved gods and celebrities.

And as storytelling shorthand for divine intervention and blessing, this is the way life-saving, human-carrying dolphins appear in folklore (such as in Plutarch). Even the histories of five early Christian saints include dolphin rescues.

Then again, the reverse also occurs. Once an idea is planted in a culture, no matter how fantastical, we tend to see it where it doesn’t exist. Any close encounter with a dolphin becomes a “life-saving rescue,” and so the myth is perpetuated. This might explain why there are so many stories of life-saving dolphins today: People are culturally primed to believe them.

In the end, folklore is fed by both storytelling impulses. However, Arion’s myth probably struck a lasting chord (pun intended) precisely because it contains some known truths about dolphins.