she gives birth through her mouth, and she frequents our houses just as she did before.

After Alcmena finished recounting these things, Iole also refused to keep the misfortune of her sister in silence. Her sister Dryope, who had been loved by Apollo, once plucked a branch from a lotus tree. This was the very tree into which the nymph Lotos had previously been transformed while fleeing the advances of Priapus. Because Dryope had violated its sacred foliage, she too was turned into a tree trunk.

"Fleeing the shameful Priapus, the nymph Lotos had brought her changed features to this tree, which kept her name. My sister did not know this; when, terrified, she tried to step back and leave after praying to the nymphs, her feet were held fast by a root..."

While these stories were being told, Iolaus—the son of Hercules and Hebe—was restored to youth by his mother. Hebe asserted that this was a privilege granted to no one else, until Themis, the goddess of justice and religion, testified that the sons of Callirhoe had been suddenly advanced from infancy to youth so that they might avenge the death of their father, who had been killed by treachery. When the gods became indignant over so many miracles, Jupiter calmed them with a speech. In the course of his words, the poet mentions Miletus, leading into the description of Byblis's transformation into a spring. Byblis and Caunus were born to Miletus the Cretan, who built the city named after himself in Asia. When the girl pursued her brother with an indecent love, Caunus fled his homeland, loathing such impurity. She followed him into Caria, where her tears were eventually turned into a flowing fountain.

"Thus, consumed by her own tears, the descendant of Phoebus, Byblis, was turned into a fountain, which even now in those valleys bears its mistress's name and flows from beneath a dark holm-oak."

The fame of this miracle would have reached Crete immediately, had an even more remarkable event not occurred in that region. A commoner named Ligdus married a woman named Telethusa and commanded her that, if she gave birth to a girl, she should kill it and only raise a male child. Afflicted with grief by her husband's cruel orders, the goddess Isis appeared to Telethusa in a dream and persuaded her to raise the child even if it were a girl, promising to be near her when the time came. Therefore, when Telethusa gave birth to a daughter, she told her husband it was a boy and gave the infant the name of its grandfather, Iphis. When the girl was thirteen, her father betrothed her to Ianthe, the daughter of Telestes. Telethusa went with her daughter to the temple of Isis, and through the goddess's power, Iphis was transformed into a man.

"The mother approaches the temple, and Iphis follows as her companion. She walks with a larger stride than usual; her face no longer retains its paleness, her strength increases, and her features themselves are sharper. Her unkempt hair is shorter, and there is more vigor present than a woman possesses; for she who was recently a woman is now a boy."

In the tenth book, the poet first recounts the marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus—the son of Apollo and Calliope (or according to others, the son of the river Oeagrus and the muse Polymnia)—married the nymph Eurydice under an ill-fated omen. While she was wandering through the wide and joyous meadows, she was killed by the bite of a serpent hiding in the grass. Orpheus took this so bitterly that he descended to the underworld to recover his wife. There, with the sweet harmony of his lyre, he obtained permission from Pluto to lead her back to the upper air, on the condition that he not look back at her until they arrived. However, as he failed to keep this condition, Eurydice was snatched back to the underworld once more. Consequently, Orpheus, stripped of all hope of recovering his wife, thereafter pursued all women with deep hatred and was seized by the forbidden contagion of male love. Eventually, as he sang on a certain hill, many animals and trees were drawn to the sweet sound of his lyre. Among them was the Pine, sacred to Cybele, into which tree Atys, the goddess’s own priest, had been transformed.

"And the Pine, with its gathered foliage and shaggy top, pleasing to the mother of the gods; for there the Cybeleian Atys shed his human form and hardened into that trunk."