Byblis daughter of Miletus loved her twin brother Caunus with a passion no sister should feel — she wrote him letters, pursued him across Caria and Lycia, and when he fled forever she wasted to tears and became a spring; Ovid sets her as the warning example that a maiden's love must stay within law.1
Forbidden love
Near the wandering Maeander, Cyane daughter of the river bore Miletus two children of surpassing beauty — Byblis and Caunus, twins. Byblis is Ovid's exemplum: she loved her brother not as a sister should, with a fire she at first did not recognize as sin, until longing outgrew shame and she resolved to speak.2
The letters
She wrote Caunus a letter confessing all — would that she might plead without naming herself, she says, until hope was realized. The servant who should deliver it read the scroll aloud in error; Caunus fled in horror, renouncing kinship and homeland. Byblis sent more letters; he would not read them. She followed, unkempt, a Bacchant of unlawful love.3
The pursuit
Through Caria and Lycia, over Cragus and past Lymira and the Xanthus, Byblis howled after the fleeing youth — past Bubassus, beyond the ridge of Chimaera, until Caunus vanished into lands she could not enter. Her hair fell loose, her girdle dropped, and she beat her breasts in the frenzy the Maeander's country had never seen.4
The spring
At last she lay down where she had chased him and never rose. The nymphs who pity hidden grief saw her limbs grow stiff, her veins turn to water, and Byblis herself become a spring that still weeps beneath the ilex — love unchanged in form, but changed enough that law could bear it.5
· EXEUNT ·
How the centuries saw it
In play
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Book IX: Byblis' letter to her twin Caunus, the flight across Asia, and the spring born of her tears — Ovid's fullest incest metamorphosis.
Byblis
Miletus' daughter who loved her brother Caunus and dissolved into a spring — the Carian aetiology that keeps both twins in reception.
Parthenius of Nicaea
Parthenius
Love Romances §11 preserves alternate Byblis endings — hanging, pursuit, and the spring — the Hellenistic dossier behind Ovid's version.