96 THE DOLPHIN—ICHTHYOPHAGI—THE TUNNY 
did the legend continue to be held that even up to the third 
century B.c. the Iasians struck coins with the device of a youth 
swimming beside a dolphin, which he clasps with one arm.! 
Like Scylla, who “fishes for dolphins and whatso greater 
beast she may anywhere take,’’ both the Thracians and Byzan- 
tines, despite the enormous annual revenues derived by the 
latter from their fisheries, caught and ate the Dolphin, and for 
so-doing are branded as impious and barbarian.2, The more 
ancient Byzantine coins show a cow standing on a dolphin, 
which perhaps symbolises the heifer crossing the Bosporus.® 
The ancient literature of the East 
also portrays Dolphins (C7 ¢umdras) 
as the ready helpers of man, in rescu- 
ing lives, in drawing ships, etc.4 The 
inhabitants of Isle Sainte Marie, near 
Madagascar, even now never harm 
or eat the fish, holding it as sacred, 
because they believe it rendered 
signal service to some ancestor.§ 
Herodotus mentions a tribe living 
eee HGErETy AND TBR Sar round Lake Prasias, who in dwellings 
ce and food resemble the Wolga folk, 
ee keer oe and early Continental] and Eaceek 
Lake-dwellers :— 
“Platforms supplied by tall piles stand in the middle of 
the lake, which are approached from the land by a narrow 
1 Brit. Mus. Cat., pl. XXI. 7. B. V. Head, Historia Numorum, 620 f. 
(ed. 2, Oxford, r911r). In Plutarch’s (de Sol. Anim., 36) the lad was thrown 
from the fish’s back by a terrible shower of hail and was drowned. 
2 Oppian, hal., V. 521 ff. 
3 B. V. Head, op. cit. p. 266 ff. As an emblem of the sea the dolphin 
is very general, from the rude sculpturings of Etruscan sarcophagi, the later 
mural adornments at Pompeii, down to the paintings of the walls of the 
Vatican by Raphael. In all, the striking dissemblancy to the actual dolphin 
of natural history can be remarked at a glance. In the case of Raphael, 
however, it must be remembered that the designs are modelled on the classical 
decorations which were discovered in the Baths of Titus, where the Dolphin 
had been o propriety introduced as a marine symbol (Moule, Heraldry 
of Fish, p. 8). 
4 De Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology (London, 1872), ii. 336. 
5 Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London, 1910), ii. 636. W. A. Cork, 
op. cit., p.96, states that the Karayds of the Amazon Valley, although eating 
nearly every other fish, abstain from the Dolphin. 
