Again, the beautiful coins of Tarentum represent Taras coming to
found the city, riding on a dolphin, whose leaps and plunges have partly
the rage of the sea in them, and partly the spring of the horse, because
the splendid riding of the Tarentines had made their name proverbial in
Magna Graeca. The story of Arion is a collateral fragment of the same
thought; and, again, the plunge, before their transformation, of the
ships of AEneas. Then, this idea of career upon, or conquest of, or by
dolphin-like ships (compare the Merlin prophecy,
"They shall ride
Over ocean wide
With hempen bridle, ad horse of tree,")
connects itself with the thought of undulation, and of the wave-power in
the sea itself, which is always expressed by the serpentine bodies either
of the sea-gods or of the sea-horse; and when Athena carries, as she does
often in later work, a serpent for her shield-sign, it is not so much the
repetition of her own aegis-snakes as the further expression of her power
over the sea-wave; which, finally, Vergil gives in its perfect unity with
her own anger, in the approach of the serpents against Laocooen from the
sea; and then, finally, when her own storm-power is fully put forth on
the ocean also, and the madness of the aegis-snake is give to the
wave-snake, the sea-wave becomes the devouring hound at the waist of
Scylla, and Athena takes Scylla for her helmet-crest; while yet her
beneficent and essential power on the ocean, in making navigation
possible, is commemorated in the Panathenaic festival by her peplus being
carried to the Erechtheum suspended from the mast of a ship.
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