Arion

ARION of Lesbos, a son of Poseidon and the Nymph Oneaea, was a master of the lyre, and invented the dithyramb in Dionysus’s honour. One day his patron Periander, tyrant of Corinth, reluctantly gave him permission to visit Taenarus in Sicily, where he had been invited to compete in a musical festival. Arion won the prize, and his admirers showered on him so many rich gifts that these excited the greed of the sailors engaged to bring him back to Corinth.
‘We much regret, Arion, that you will have to die,’ remarked the captain of the ship. ‘What crime have I committed?’ asked Arion.
‘You are too rich,’ replied the captain.
‘Spare my life, and I will give you all my prizes,’ Arion pleaded.
‘You would only retract your promise on reaching Corinth,’ said the captain, ‘and so would I, in your place. A forced gift is no gift.’
‘Very well,’ cried Arion resignedly. ‘But pray allow me to sing a last song.’
When the captain gave his permission, Arion, dressed in his finest robe, mounted on the prow, where he invoked the gods with impassioned strains, and then leaped overboard. The ship sailed on.

b. However, his song had attracted a school of music-loving dolphins, one of which took Arion on his back, and that evening he overtook the ship and reached the port of Corinth several days before it cast anchor there. Periander was overjoyed at his miraculous escape, and the dolphin, lath 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.
c. Nor was Arion the first man to have been saved by a dolphin. A dolphin rescued Enables when he leaped overboard to join his sweetheart Phonies who, in accordance with an oracle, had been chosen by lot and thrown into the sea to appease Amphitricha-for this was the expedition which the sons of Penthouse were leading to Lesbos as the island’s first colonists-and the dolphin’s mate rescued Phonies. Another dolphin saved Helianthus from drowning in the Crustacean Sea on his way to Italy. Likewise Cadies, the Cretan brother of Yaps, 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.
1. Both Arion and Periander are historical characters of the seventh, century BC, and a fragment of Arian’s Hymn to Poseidon survives. The story is perhaps based partly on a tradition that Arian’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 Palimony, lyre in hand, arriving at Corinth on dolphin-back. Mythic color is lent to the story by making Arion a son   of Poseidon, as was his namesake, the wild horse Arion, 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 Proselyte, 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. 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 Enables and Phonies is probably deduced from an icon which showed Amphitricha and Triton riding on dolphins. Enables is also associated by Plutarch with an octopus cult, and his name recalls that of Oedipus, the Corinthian New Year Child, he will have been at Mytilene, as Helianthus 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); Helianthus, the founder of Dorian Tarentum in 708 BC, took over the dolphin cult from the Cretanized Sicilians 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.