So _Dolphins_ teem, whom subject Fish revere, And show the smiling Seas their Infant-Heir. All other Kinds, whom Parent-Seas confine, _Dolphins_ excell; that Race is all divine. _Dolphins_ were Men (Tradition hands the Tale) Laborious Swains bred on the _Tuscan_ Vale: Transform’d by _Bacchus_, and by _Neptune_ lov’d, They all the Pleasures of the Deep improv’d. When new-made Fish the God’s Command obey’d, Plung’d in the Waves, and untry’d Fins displayed, No further Change relenting _Bacchus_ wrought, Nor have the _Dolphins_ all the Man forgot; The conscious Soul retains her former Thought. The god of the golden trident who rules over the seas, Poseidon, would not have prospered in his wooing of Amphitrite if it had not been for the assistance of a dolphin, who apprized Poseidon of her hiding-place. For this service, as is well-known, Poseidon set the dolphin among the stars in the constellation which bears its name to this day. It is interesting in this connection that in a modern Greek folktale from Zacynthos, Poseidon changes a hero who has fallen into the sea into a dolphin until such time as he should find a maiden ready to be his wife. After some time the dolphin rescues a shipwrecked king and his daughter, the princess by way of reward takes him for her husband, and the spell is broken (Bernhard Schmidt, _Das Volksleben der Neugriechen_, p. 135). The cult of Apollo Delphinus was initiated, so legend has it, by Icadius who, leaving his native land of Lycia, which he had named for his mother, set out for Italy. Shipwrecked on the way, he was taken on the back of a dolphin, which set him down near Mount Parnassus, where he founded a temple to his father Apollo, and called the place Delphi after the dolphin. For this reason the dolphin became among the things most sacred to Apollo (Servius, _Commentarii in Vergilii Aeneidos_, III, 332; also Cornificius Longus, _De Etymis Deorum_). Herodotos, writing of Periander (fl. 600 B.C.) tyrant of Corinth, tells one of the most famous of all stories of the dolphin (it is mentioned by Shakespeare in the first act of _Twelfth Night_). “In his time,” writes Herodotos (b. 484 B.C.), “a very wonderful thing is said to have happened. The Corinthians and the Lesbians agree in their account of the matter. They relate that Arion of Methymna, who, as a player on the lyre, was second to no man living at that time, and who was, so far as we know, the first to invent the dithyrambic measure, to give it its name, and to conduct in it at Corinth, was carried to Taenarum on the back of a dolphin.