This page has been validated.
108
THE HISTORY OF HERODOTUS.

sary is still celebrated at Bristol, is well known in the west of England. A ship in which he sailed was said to have sprung a leak, which was miraculously plugged by a self-sacrificing dolphin, and so the ship came home safe. Some rationalists have volunteered the prosaic explanation that Colston was saved and brought home in another vessel called the Dolphin. One of the charitable societies formed in his honour bears the name of the "Dolphin." The sacred character of this fish (or rather cetacean) is doubtless of remote antiquity. He is the subject of a little poem (exquisite in the original) by Philip of Thessalonica.

The Dolphin and the Nightingale.
"Blaming Boreas, o'er the sea I was flying slowly,
For the wind of Thrace to me is a thing unholy,
When his back a dolphin showed, bending with devotion,
And the child of æther rode on the child of ocean.
I am that sweet-chanting bird whom the night doth smile at;
And like one that kept his word proved my dolphin pilot.
As he glided onward still with his oarless rowing,
With the lute within my bill I did cheer his going.
Dolphins never ply for hire, but for love and glory,
When the sons of song require; trust Arion's story."

There is also a beautiful version of the legend by the Roman poet Ovid.

Cleisthenes of Sicyon was another eminent tyrant, and a magnificent man in every way. He had one beautiful daughter named Agariste, through whom despotism was fated to receive its death-blow in Athens. Like the Orsinis and Colonnas of medieval Rome,