18
When Arion had told all this, continued Gorgus, I asked him where he thought the ship would make harbour; and he replied that it would surely come to Corinth, but its arrival would be much later; for he thought that after he had thrown himself overboard in the evening, he had been carried a distance of not less than fifty or more miles, and a calm had fallen immediately. Gorgus went on to say that he had ascertained the name of the captain and of the pilot, and the ship’s emblem, and had sent out boats and soldiers to the landing-places to keep strict watch; moreover, he had brought Arion with him, carefully concealed, so that the guilty ones might not gain any premature information of his rescue from death, and make good their escape; and in fact the whole affair seemed like an event divinely directed, for his men were here just as he arrived, and he learned that the ship had been seized, and the traders and sailors arrested.
19
Accordingly Periander bade Gorgus to withdraw at once, and have these men put into prison where nobody should have access to them or tell them that Arion had been rescued.
19
Well! well! said Aesop, you all make fun of my jackdaws and crows if they talk with one another, and yet dolphins indulge in such pranks as this!
19
Let’s change the subject, Aesop, said I to him; more than a thousand years have elapsed since this dolphin story has been believed and committed to writing in Greek lands, even from the days of Ino and Athamas. Ino also threw herself into the sea when the crazed Athamas was about to kill her, and was metamorphosed into the sea-goddess Leucothea.
