De Incredibilibus

What I say about the Amazons is that they were not women who fought in battle, but they were foreign men who wore full-length tunics, like Thracian women do, and tied up their hair with bands and shaved their beards like the men of Patara on the Xanthos river [*](The form of the placename is corrupt. Following Stern we translate Froehner’s conjecture.) do even now. Because of this, they were called women by their enemies. This race of Amazons was good at fighting. It is unlikely that an army of women ever existed, for there’s no such thing anywhere today.

False, too, is the myth about Orpheus: that four-legged beasts, reptiles, birds and trees would follow him when he played the cithara.

I think that this is how things came to pass. Bacchants in their frenzies tore livestock to pieces in Pieria; amongst the other violent things they did, they decamped to the mountains and spent their days there. While they were up there the townsfolk, worried about their wives and daughters, had to summon Orpheus to devise a plan to get them down from the mountain. After sacrificing to Dionysos, he led down the frenzied women playing his cithara. They came down from the mountain holding then for the first time stalks of giant fennel and branches from all sorts of trees. People watching were amazed by the foliage and said, Even the forest comes down from the mountain when Orpheus plays his cithara. And from this event the myth was fabricated.

The story about Pandora is not acceptable: that she was moulded from clay and then passed on her likeness to others. I don’t think this is the case.

Rather, Pandora was a very wealthy Greek woman and, whenever she went out, she would adorn herself by applying a lot of clay to her skin. She was the first to discover how to use a lot of clay to enhance her complexion. (Many women do this now, but none of them attracts comment for it because it's so common). That was the actual event, but the story was turned into something impossible.

Among the other foolish things people say is that the first race of humans was born from ash trees [meliai]. But I think it is not possible for humans to be born from wood.

Rather, there was a man called Melios, after whom were named the Meliai [‘daughters of Melios’], just as the Hellenes were named after Hellen and the Ionians were named after Ion. But that whole family line perished and the name was lost. Likewise, the races of iron and bronze never existed, but are made-up nonsense.