individual. "There is no historicity in this tale", according to Eunice Burr Stebbins, Arion and the dolphins are given as an example of "a folkloristic motif especially associated with Apollo" by Irad Malkin. Erasmus instanced Arion as one of the traditional poet's topics that sound like historia rather than fabulae, though he misremembered that Augustine had taken the Arion story to be historical. Mythological parallels The pirates episode may be seen as a doublet of the fate of Melicertes, where the leap into the sea was that of his mother, Ino. transformed into the "white goddess" Leucothea; Melicertes was carried more dead than alive to the shores where the Isthmian Games were celebrated in his honour, as he was transformed to the hero Palaimon, who was placated with a nocturnal chthonic rite, and the whose winners were crowned with a barren wreath of spruce. A similar story of told of the founding of Taras in Megale Hellas (Magna Graecia), modern Taranto, Apulia, Italy. When a son of Poseidon called Taras was shipwrecked, his father rescued him by sending a dolphin which he rode to traverse the sea from the promontory of Taenarum to the south of Italy. Brought ashore, Taras founded the city of the same name. According to Pausanias, he was worshiped as a hero who named both the city and the river, Taras after himself. Another parallel is the myth of Dionysus and the sailors, related in the Homeric Hymns: Tyrrhenian pirates try to lash the god to the mast, but the wood itself starts to sprout and the mast is entwined with ivy (like the god's thyrsus); the sailors leap into the sea and are transformed into dolphins. This is especially interesting because Arion is credited with the invention of the dithyramb, a dionysiac song form. Scholarly interpretations In light of the above parallels, Walter Burkert interprets the story as a significant development in the history of Dionysiac cult: "Released from this gloomy background, the cheerful and liberating legend of the sixth century further developed the image of the dolphin-rider under the colours of the renewed cult of Dionysus.". C. M. Bowra tied the myth to the period following the expulsion from Corinth of the aristocratic Bacchiadae, who traced their descent from Dionysus: "the cult of the god had to develop new and more democratic forms." Stewart Flory identified Herodotus' characteristic use of the episode in a