In literature Periander could accomplish little. The absence of the literary gift among the Corinthians is strikingly shown by the fact that the name of only one native poet, Eumelus, has been handed down to us, and that he belonged to the ancient oligarchy of the eighth century. Two lyric lines traditionally assigned to him survive, the only fragment of Corinthian literature. Their imputed authorship indicates that Eumelus was not without fame, since the Doric Messenians, even less literary than the Corinthians, chose him to compose a song to Apollo to be sung by their embassy at the great Ionian festival at Delos. But embedded in the most important literature of Greece is an element which probably came into life in Corinth under Periander’s patronage. The choruses of the drama and the so-called dithyrambs or Dionysiac songs written by such lyric poets as Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides, seem equally to go back to some outgrowth of the stray wine-songs extemporized by revellers. A favourite tradition assigned this new form to a poet called Arion, who, though a Lesbian by birth, “composed, named, and taught the dithyramb at Corinth.” Herodotus adds a story which takes Arion out of the mists of tradition and places him, a sunlit figure, on the quarter-deck of a Corinthian ship rounding Cape Tænarum on its way back from Sicily. He had gone thither and made money, and on the return journey the Corinthian sailors, in whom he had thought he could most safely confide, gave him his choice of killing himself outright, if he wished a grave on dry land, or of leaping overboard into the Ionian Sea. In this strait Arion “begged of them, since such was their determination, that they would give him leave to take his stand dressed in his full regalia on the quarter-deck, and promised that from there he would sing to them and then would make away with himself. To the sailors it seemed a pleasant thing if they might hear the best of living singers, and from the stern they drew off amidships. And Arion, clad in his full costume, took his cithara and, stationed on the planking, went through with the Orthian strain, and, when the strain was concluded, flung himself into the sea, just as he was, in full costume dressed. Now the ship’s crew sailed off to Corinth, but a dolphin, as they say, took up Arion and carried him to Tænarum and he, alighting, went off, regalia and all, to Corinth and told, on his arrival, everything that had befallen.”