Daphne immediately commenced her transformation into a laurel tree ("Laurus nobilis"): Even this did not quench Apollo's ardour, and as he embraced the tree, he felt her heart still beating. He then declared: Upon hearing his words, Daphne bends her branches, approving his decision. A version of the attempt on Daphne's sworn virginity that has been less familiar since the Renaissance was narrated by the Hellenistic poet Parthenius, in his "Erotica Pathemata", "The Sorrows of Love". Parthenius' tale, based on the Hellenistic historian Phylarchus, was known to Pausanias, who recounted it in his "Description of Greece" (2nd century AD). In this,
Daphne Daphne Daphne (; , meaning "laurel") a minor figure in Greek mythology, is a naiad, a variety of female nymph associated with fountains, wells, springs, streams, brooks and other bodies of freshwater. She is said by ancient sources variously to have been a daughter of the river god Peneus and the nymph Creusa in Thessaly (Hyginus "Fabulae" 203) or of Ladon (the river Ladon in Arcadia) or Pineios, and to Ge (or Gaia) (Pausanias and others). There are several versions of the myth in which she appears, but the general narrative appears in Greco-Roman mythology, is that due to a