The Pirates Who Captured a God: Dionysus and the Tyrrhenian Sailors

The seventh Homeric Hymn tells of a beautiful youth standing alone on a headland by the sea, and of a shipload of Tyrrhenian pirates who mistake him for a prince worth a ransom and seize him, binding him to their mast. Their helmsman, Acoetes, recognizes at once that this is no ordinary captive and no rope could hold him, and begs the crew to let the youth go, but the others refuse and set sail regardless. The god they have taken lets them find out who he is. Sweet-smelling wine begins to flow across the deck of its own accord, a vine climbs the mast and spreads across the sail heavy with grapes, and ivy twines up the rigging. The crew's fear turns to terror when Dionysus himself becomes a roaring lion on the deck and conjures a shaggy bear beside it, and the sailors leap overboard one after another rather than face either beast, only to find themselves transformed in the water into dolphins as they fall. Acoetes alone, the one man who urged the god's release, is spared and kept safe by Dionysus's own hand. The hymn closes by naming him lord of vine-clad Nysa, and the transformed sailors are why dolphins keep their old reputation in Greek tradition as the most humane of sea creatures, men still swimming inside an animal's shape.