Leto Olympian Pantheon, and the goddesses at Delos who bear witness to the rightness of the birth are the great goddesses of the old order. Demeter was not present and Aphrodite was not either but Rhea attended. The goddess Dione (in her name simply the "Goddess") is sometimes taken by later mythographers as a mere feminine form of Zeus (see entry Dodona). If that was the case, she would not have assembled here. Leto was threatened and assailed in her wanderings by chthonic monsters of the ancient earth and old ways, and these became the enemies of Apollo and Artemis. One
Zeus and the Tortoise deign to be present at the wedding of Zeus. The divine messenger Hermes was then sent to throw her and her house into the river, where she was changed into the animal now bearing her name. In the late 15th century, the Venetian Laurentius Abstemius created a Neo-Latin variant on the fable which was subsequently added to their fable collections by both Gabriele Faerno and by L'Estrange. It relates how, when the animals were invited to ask gifts of Zeus at the dawn of time, the snail petitioned for the ability to carry her home with her. Zeus asked if