21
Sybaris is a city of Italy, where there was one Aemilius, a very handsome young man, and a lover of hunting. His wife (whom he had lately married) took up a suspicion that, under color of the chase, he carried on an assignation with some other woman. She traced him to the wood, and upon the noise of the boughs in her passage, the dogs ran presently to her and tore her to pieces; and her husband stabbed himself immediately upon this miserable accident.—Clitonymus, in the Second Book of his Sybaritics.
22
One Smyrna (to whom Venus owed a shame, it seems) fell passionately in love with her father Cinyras, and made the nurse her confidant. She goes craftily to work with her master, and tells him of a maid there in the neighborhood that loved him above all things in the world, but she could not in modesty appear publicly to him. So the father lay ignorantly with his own daughter. But some time after, having a great mind to see his mistress, he called for a light, and when he saw who it was, he pursued the incestuous wretch with his drawn sword; but by the providence of Venus, she was rescued from that danger, and turned into a myrrh-tree.—Theodorus, in his Transformations.
