Book 10
12.4
Even to-day there remain on Trojan Ida the ruins of the city Marpessus, with some sixty inhabitants. All the land around Marpessus is reddish and terribly parched, so that the light and porous nature of Ida in this place is in my opinion the reason why the river Aidoneus sinks into the ground, rises to sink once more, finally disappearing altogether beneath the earth. Marpessus is two hundred and forty stades distant from Alexandria in the Troad.
12.5
The inhabitants of this Alexandria say that Herophile became the attendant of the temple of Apollo Smintheus, and that on the occasion of Hecuba's dream she uttered the prophecy which we know was actually fulfilled. This Sibyl passed the greater part of her life in Samos, but she also visited Clarus in the territory of Colophon, Delos and Delphi. Whenever she visited Delphi, she would stand on this rock and sing her chants.
12.6
However, death came upon her in the Troad, and her tomb is in the grove of the Sminthian with these elegiac verses inscribed upon the tomb-stone:—Here I am, the plain-speaking Sibyl of Phoebus,Hidden beneath this stone tomb.A maiden once gifted with voice, but now for ever voiceless,By hard fate doomed to this fetter.But I am buried near the nymphs and this Hermes,Enjoying in the world below a part of the kingdom I had then.The Hermes stands by the side of the tomb, a square-shaped figure of stone. On the left is water running down into a well, and the images of the nymphs.
12.7
The Erythraeans, who are more eager than any other Greeks to lay claim to Herophile, adduce as evidence a mountain called Mount Corycus with a cave in it, saying that Herophile was born in it, and that she was a daughter of Theodorus, a shepherd of the district, and of a nymph. They add that the surname Idaean was given to the nymph simply because the men of those days called idai places that were thickly wooded. The verse about Marpessus and the river Aidoneus is cut out of the oracles by the Erythraeans.
