They report that in the same India there is a nation of women who conceive at five years of age and do not exceed the eighth year of life. There are also said to be other fabulous portents of men, which do not exist, but are invented and interpreted as explanations of things, such as Geryon, king of Spain, reported to have been of triple form. For there were three brothers of such concord that in three bodies there was as it were one soul. The Gorgons too, harlots with hair of serpents, who turned those looking upon them into stones, having a single eye which they used by turns. Now there were three sisters of one beauty, as it were of one eye, who made their beholders so astounded that they were thought to turn them into stones.
They imagine that there were three Sirens, in part maidens, in part birds, having wings and talons: of whom one used to sing with her voice, another with pipes, the third with a lyre. And these, having lured sailors under their song, would draw them into shipwreck. But according to the truth they were harlots, who, because they used to lead travellers into destitution, were feigned to inflict shipwreck. And they were imagined to have had wings and talons, because love both flies and wounds. They are said to have lingered there among the waves, because the waves created Venus.
They also say that Scylla was a woman girded with dogs' heads and loud barkings, on account of the strait of the Sicilian sea, in which sailors, terrified by the whirlpools of the waves rushing together against one another, imagine that the waves are barking, waves which the whirlpool of the devouring surge dashes together. They likewise invent certain monsters of irrational creatures, such as Cerberus, the dog of the underworld having three heads, signifying by him the three ages through which death devours a man, that is, infancy, youth, and old age. Some suppose that he was for this reason called Cerberus, as if 'kreoboros,' that is, 'flesh-devouring.' They also speak of the Hydra, a serpent with nine heads, which in Latin is called 'excetra,' because when one head was cut off three would grow up.
But it is established that the Hydra was a place spewing forth waters and laying waste a neighbouring city, in which, when one channel was stopped up, many would break out. Hercules, seeing this, burned up those very places and thus closed the outlets of the waters. For 'hydra' is named from water ('aqua'). Ambrose makes mention of this in a likeness of heresies, saying (On the Faith 1,4): 'For heresy, like some hydra of fables, has grown by its own wounds; and while it is often cut back, it has sprouted afresh, doomed to fire and destined to perish in the conflagration.' They also invent the Chimaera, a three-formed beast: a lion in front, a dragon in its hindmost parts, a she-goat in the middle. Some natural philosophers say that it was not an animal, but a mountain of Cilicia, nourishing lions and she-goats in certain places, burning in certain places, and full of serpents in certain places.
Bellerophon made this mountain habitable, whence he is said to have slain the Chimaera. The name of Centaurs was applied to a species, that is, a man mixed with a horse; some say they were the horsemen of the Thessalians, but because, as they galloped in war, the bodies of horses and men seemed to be as one, from this men asserted the Centaurs to be a fiction. Furthermore the Minotaur took its name from bull ('taurus') and man ('homo'), a kind of beast which they say in fable was shut up in the Labyrinth. Concerning it Ovid writes (Art of Love 2,24): 'the half-bull man and the half-man bull.' The Onocentaur is so called because it is said to be half in the form of a man and half of an ass; just as the Hippocentaurs, because the nature of horses and men is thought to have been joined in them. IV. ON THINGS TRANSFORMED.
There are also written certain monstrous transformations and changes of men into beasts, as concerning that most famous sorceress Circe, who is said to have changed even the companions of Ulysses into beasts; and concerning the Arcadians, who, being chosen by lot, would swim across a certain lake and there be turned into wolves. For also they confirm, not by fabulous falsehood but by historical affirmation, that the companions of Diomedes were turned into birds. But some also assert that Strigae (screech-witches) are made out of human beings. For unto many crimes the shapes of the wicked are changed, and whether by magic incantations or by the poison of herbs they pass over in their whole bodies into wild beasts. Indeed by nature also very many things undergo change, and being corrupted are transformed into diverse species;
as bees come from the rotting flesh of calves, beetles from horses, locusts from mules, scorpions from crabs. Ovid (Metamorphoses 15,369): 'If you take away the hollow claws of the shore-dwelling crab, a scorpion will come forth, and it will threaten with its hooked tail.'