Typhon those surrounding Python. Although the Delphic monster killed by Apollo is usually said to be the male serpent Python, in the "Homeric Hymn to Apollo", the earliest account of this story, the god kills a nameless she-serpent ("drakaina"), subsequently called Delphyne, who had been Typhon's foster-mother. Delphyne and Echidna, besides both being intimately connected to Typhon—one as mother, the other as mate—share other similarities. Both were half-maid and half-snake, a plague to men, and associated with the Corycian cave in Cilicia. Python was also perhaps connected with a different Corycian Cave than the one in Cilicia, this one on the
Woman Bitten by a Serpent Woman Bitten by a Serpent Woman Bitten by a Serpent is an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger (1814-1883), now in the musée d'Orsay in Paris. It was commissioned by the industrialist Alfred Mosselman and first exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1847, where it and Thomas Couture's "The Romans in their Decadence" were the most commented-upon works. Clésinger had modelled his work on a life-cast of the Mossellman's mistress, the demi-mondaine Apollonie Sabatier (1822-1890), later Charles Baudelaire's muse. The direct use of a life cast as the basis for a sculpture was highly controversial in the 19th century, particularly