Usurpers of the Delphic name: Dolphin imposters in the long eighteenth century
Presented on: Thursday, February 27th 2025 at 12:00 PM EST
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When is a dolphin not a dolphin?
Conceptions of the dolphin are deeply embedded in classical mythologies, appearing as messengers of the gods, oceanic saviors, or sometimes even as the gods themselves in disguise. Furthermore, dolphins frequently appeared in art and literature, responding to and reflecting the numerous real encounters those ancient cultures had with this friendly oceanic mammal.
Despite all of that however, knowledge about the dolphin seemed to have slowly faded from the public memory – by the late sixteenth century, naturalists bemoaned the state of popular conceptions of the dolphin, a creature that had increasingly become more of a reference to a symbol than a real living animal. The advent of more formalized branches of biological study in the eighteenth century did surprisingly little to halt the cultural effacement of the dolphin we know today. This degradation reached its peak in this period, culminating in the name fracturing into the ‘dolphin of the ancients’ and the ‘dolphin of the moderns’.
In this talk, Dr. David Hou traces the development of this taxonomic instability and proposes that it can be best understood through the era’s particular blend of utilitarian and aesthetic values.
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