Is Delphi really connected with Dolphins?

Delphi – it’s a long way uphill.

In town there’s a princess waiting outside the photographers for her prints. Like her, could I be disappointed to find with Delphi and Delphinus, that just because words sound similar they’re not necessarily connected?

It seems possible. Delphi is a town that’s found two thousand feet up a hillside in central Greece. You can see the sea from Delphi, but it’s distant and a long walk. If you were going to set up a sanctuary to a dolphin god, Delphi would probably be near the bottom of the list of likely sites. There are a couple of reasons to think that the constellation Delphinus could be connected with Apollo Delphinios and Delphi. The simplest reason is that someone has told us so.

The original versions of ancient texts have rarely survived. There are papyri found in Egypt which date from antiquity. Most texts survive as copies of copies, made by monks to learn ancient Greek or Latin. In the margins of some of these copies a few people, known to ancient historians as scholiasts, made notes. In one version of Phaenomena one scholiast made the note that Delphinus represented Apollo.

Of course, he could have just been stating his own opinion, or been wrong or both.

There are also the Homeric Hymns. These days they’re not thought to have been written by Homer, but nevertheless are considered pretty old and from around the right period. One the Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo describes the foundation of Delphi.

In this hymn a ship of Cretan sailors are sailing along when a dolphin leaps onto the ship. This dolphin turns into Apollo “shining like a star” who leads them east “to dawn and the sun”. At this point it’s tempting to get carried away. He’s a star in the east in dawn AND a dolphin, which would describe the heliacal rising of Delphinus. However, this could have been the poet’s equivalent of special effects. There’s not a lot else he could shine like, so there may be nothing special about him being a star.

Luckily the poem is pretty emphatic. When the sailors reach the port of Krissa he commands them up into the mountains. Here he commands that they name the sanctuary after the form he first used to appear to them, Delphinios. So the city became Delphi because it was the site of the sanctuary of Apollo as a Dolphin.

Strange as it may seem the ancient texts do seem to emphatically state that Delphi was home to a dolphin cult despite being many miles away from the sea.