Arion and the stars of the Dolphin

Ariôn won a rich prize for his music, and boarded a ship to go home. The sailors stole his prize and made him jump into the sea. A dolphin rescued him, carried him on its back to safety.

Arion was probably a real person, from Methymna on the Greek island Lesbos, but he became a myth.

(His name is, in an English context, probably most often pronounced with a sh’wa or neutral vowel in the first and last syllables, thus indistinguishably from “Orion”; I prefer to start it with the vowel of “cat.”)

He was reputed to be a son of the sea god Poseidon and a sea nymph. He lived as a guest in the court of Periander, who was tyrant of Corinth from 625 to 585 BC. (In Greek city-states, “tyrant” was the term for individuals who took power; many of them were enlightened rulers, rather than “tyrannical” in the later sense.)

The Acrocorinthus, or acropolis of Corinth; a sketch I made when cycling in Greece. It seemed to me that any invaders who tried to attack this fortress would be utterly exhausted when they got up to it.

Arion played the kithara, a seven-stringed lute, and sang to it; he was “second to none” among the professionals called kitharodes or kithara-singers.

His story was recorded by the historian Herodotus (around 440 BC), and a few later writers added bits. He was said to have invented the dithyramb, a form of song in honor of Dionysus (Bacchus), with a chorus of fifty dancing in a circle to represent the satyrs who accompanied the cheerfully drunken god. (Hence the dithyramb was also called kuklios, “circular,” and another version called Arion the son of Cyclon, “circle.”) However, the dithyramb was mentioned by an earlier writer, Archilochus, about 665 BC, so Arion may have introduced it to Corinth, improving its music and adding the chorus.

No other information has been preserved about Arion’s music, poetry, and life, except the famous tale of the dolphin.

He took a long trip from Corinth to one of the Greek colonies in Sicily, so as to compete in a musical festival; won the prize, perhaps cups and shields of gold. On the ship back, the sailors saw and coveted his prize. They gave him a choice: Kill yourself, and we will give you a decent burial; or throw yourself into the sea to drown. He chose the sea, but asked for time to play one last song. He played and sang a hymn to Apollo, god of music and the arts. The enchanting sound attracted a school of dolphins. Arion leapt into the sea, still clutching his kithara, and one of the dolphins took him on its back and carried him ashore, at the temle of Poseidon on Cape Tainaron, at the southern end of Greece, from which he made his way to Corinth. One of the later writers, the satirist Lucian (about 180 AD), added a comic conversation between the dolphin and Poseidon.

Red-figure vase depiction made about 350 BC by the Etruscans in Italy, who inherited much of Greek culture. The musician riding a dolphin is playing not a kithara but a flute.

The dolphin apparently carried Arion right up onto land; Arion forgot to help the dolphin back into the water, and it died. Arion was welcomed home by Periander, who ordered that the dolphin’s body be fetched and buried and a monument built over it.

As for the ship, it was driven by a storm, which unluckily took it all the way around and into the gulf of Corinth. Periander had the sailors arrested. He questioned them about Arion, and they lied that he had died and they had buried him. Arion, who had been told to hide inside the Monument of the Dolphin, emerged.

Periander ordered that the sailors be crucified. Arion intervened: “No, Chief. Pardon them. If you do that, they will be the most loyal of your servants.” That’s my contribution to the story, trying to cancel the bit of it that cost me hours of sleep. No one should have suffered that, ever. Arion, strumming every day on his kithara, must have been a sunny soul. A similar vengeful cruelty spoils the ending of the Odyssey.

Delphinus

Apollo translated Arion’s dolphin to the sky, as the constellation Delphinus. It’s another of the small constellations in the edge of the Milky Way between Cygnus and Aquila, and it’s one of the constellations that do look like what they are supposed to depict.

Detail from our Map of the Starry Sky.

In 2015 an exoplanet orbiting the magnitude 5.5 star 18 Delphini, which is 249 light years away, was discovered and named Arion, and the star itself received the name Musica.

The word

“Dolphin” is in Greek delphis – curiously related to delphys, “womb,” and hence to adelphos, “womb-mate, sibling.” (Turkish for “brother” is kardesh, “womb-mate,” apparently a word so primal that it resisted the general Turkish sound-change called vowel harmony, which would have smoothed it to kardaash.) Perhaps the animal was thought of as a “fish with a womb,” because it produces live young, not spawn. The word was extended as delphinos, passed into Latin as delphinus, medieval Latin dolfinus, French daulphin, dolphin, hence into English. An older English word for the animal was mereswine, “sea pig.”

The litle whale

Dolphins, of which there are 40 species, are mammals, the smallest members of the whale infra-order, Cetaceae. They have intelligence, indeed culture – they teach the next generation – and, if they had hands, might have developed technology, which is why the founders of SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, called themselves the Order of the Dolphin.

They seem to be curious or friendly toward humans, play with their keepers in zoo pools, really do let people ride on their backs. They gambol around ships, breaching in arcs out of the water. I thought I remembered seeing that as I climbed out onto the bowsprit of our tall ship as we sailed to see the eclipse of 1998 in the Caribbean sea, but it must have been wishful thinking.

Delphi

The most sought-after of the Greek oracles, who could give answers – often cryptic answers – to questions about fate, was the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, up a mountainside in the ancient region of Phocis, on the north side of the Gulf of Corinth. (I once got stranded there because I was with a bus load of Yugoslavian tourists and got separated from them.)

The Greek name of the place is Delphoi, but variants appeared in inscriptions – Dalphoi, Dolphoi, Derphoi – perhaps due to the dialect that the Phocians spoke.

We could imagine a connection of this sea-overhanging valley with dolphins, but more certain is that it was related to delphys, the “womb”: Delphi was called the womb of the Earth, and at it was a stone believed to be the omphalos, “navel” of the universe.

Folk tale?

The rescue-by-dolphin story may be a pre-existing folk tale that was applied to Arion. It was said by several later writers, including Erasmus, to be un-historical. Another Greek instance is that Taras, a son of Poseidon, was shipwrecked; his father sent a dolphin, on which he rode ashore in southern Italy, where he founded the city of Tarentum (Taranto).

Perhaps similar are mermaids, who sometimes mate with humans and live with them on land or under the sea; and even the albatross that alighted “for food or play” on the Ancient Mariner’s ship and saved it from the Antarctic ice; and the Greek story of Psamathe, the seal who in the seventh of the seventh waves rolled ashore on Aegina and shed her skin and married Aeacus, who became the grandfather of Ajax and Achilles; and the stories from the Atlantic coasts of Europe of selkies – “I am a man upon the land, I am a selkie in the sea, and when I’m far from any strand my home it is in Sule Skerry.”

Greek mythology also had a miraculous horse named Ariôn, or Areiôn, offspring off Poseidon and Demeter. The gods gave this horse to Hercules, who rode it during some of his exploits and then gave it to Adrastus, king of Argos. In the war of the seven Argive champions against Thebes, they were defeated and killed, except Adrastus, whom the mighty horse carried to safety.

A modern Arion

The kithara was a seven-stringed member of the lyre family of musical instruments. The words zither and guitar may be descended from it, but the instruments are not, having different structure.

Ian Dicks takes morning swims from the jetty at Lyme Regis across to the Cobb harbor, half a mile or so. He also plays the guitar, so I like to picture him doing both at the same time, like Arion.

One of the pleasantest things I can remember was a video made by Margaret, in which the camera panned slowly over the sunny terraces of a village somewhere in Provence, to the accompaniment of soft music. At last it came around to Ian, at ease on a balcony and playing his guitar. I hope Ian will comment by giving us a link to that video.

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