630She spoke, and (so great is the discord of her uncertain mind) though she regrets having tried, she is eager to try: and she exceeds all limit and, unhappy, lets herself be rejected again and again. 633Soon, when there is no end, he flees his homeland and the outrage, and founds new walls in a foreign land. 635Then indeed, they say, the daughter of Miletus, grieving, lost her mind entirely; then indeed she tore the clothes from her breast and in frenzy beat her arms. 638And now she is openly mad and confesses her unlawful hope of love, since she leaves her homeland and her hated home and follows the tracks of her fleeing brother.
641And as the Ismarian Bacchants, stirred by your thyrsus, son of Semele, celebrate the recurring triennial rites, just so the women of Bubassus saw Byblis howling through the broad fields. 644Leaving them behind, she wanders through Caria and the armed Leleges and Lycia. 646Now she had left behind Cragus and Limyre and the waters of Xanthus, and the ridge where the Chimaera, in its middle parts, had fire, a lioness's chest and face, and a serpent's tail; 649the woods give out, when you, exhausted by your pursuit, collapse, and with your hair laid on the hard earth, Byblis, you lie and press the fallen leaves with your face. 652Often too the Lelegeian nymphs try to lift her in their tender arms; 653often they advise her how to heal her love, and offer comfort to a deaf mind: silent she lies and holds the green grass with her nails, Byblis, and a stream of tears waters the turf.
657They say the Naiads placed beneath these tears a channel that could never dry up: for what greater thing did they have to give? 659At once, as drops of pitch from the cut bark of a pine, or as sticky bitumen oozes from the heavy earth, or as water that froze with cold softens again in the sun at the coming of the gently breathing west wind, so Phoebus' descendant Byblis, consumed by her own tears, is turned into a spring, which even now in those valleys bears its mistress's name and flows beneath a dark holm-oak.