39.  Thirdly, Athena is the air in its power over the sea.

On the earliest Panathenaic vase known—­the “Burgon” vase in the British museum—­Athena has a dolphin on her shield.  The dolphin has two principal meanings in Greek symbolism.  It means, first, the sea; secondarily, the ascending and descending course of any of the heavenly bodies from one sea horizon to another—­the dolphins’ arching rise and replunge (in a summer evening, out of calm sea, their black backs roll round with exactly the slow motion of a water-wheel; but I do not know how far Aristotle’s exaggerated account of their leaping or their swiftness has any foundation) being taken as a type of the emergence of the sun or stars from the sea in the east, and plunging beneath in the west.  Hence, Apollo, when in his personal power he crosses the sea, leading his Cretan colonists to Pytho, takes the form of a dolphin, becomes Apollo Delphinius, and names the founded colony “Delphi.”  The lovely drawing of the Delphic Apollo on the hydria of the Vatican (Le Normand and De Witte, vol. ii. p. 6) gives the entire conception of this myth.  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.