Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

The seventh Homeric Hymn tells how pirates—Tyrrhenian (Etruscan) sailors in the Greek telling—sighted Dionysus on a shore. He appeared as a youth in the first bloom of manhood, dark-haired, wearing a fine cloak and purple tunic. Thinking him the son of a king and a prize for ransom, they seized him, bound him, and hauled him aboard. The bonds would not hold: withes fell from his hands and feet. The helmsman alone recognized a god and urged the crew to free him and put him ashore, warning of divine wrath. The captain and the rest refused, greedy for profit. Then wonders broke out: wine ran fragrant through the ship; a vine sprang along the mast and sail, heavy with grapes; ivy twined the mast with berries; garlands decked the thole-pins. Dionysus became a lion amidships and made a shaggy bear appear; the lion sprang upon the captain. The sailors, terrified, leapt into the sea and were changed into dolphins. The helmsman Dionysus spared, revealed himself as the loud-crying god, son of Zeus and Semele, and blessed him. The Hymn thus joins Dionysus’s epiphany, the punishment of sacrilegious greed, and the etiology of dolphins as transformed men—an early classical Greek narrative independent of later Roman elaboration.