There is a projecting stone above, on which the Delphians say the first Herophile, also called the Sibyl, chanted her oracles.[97] I found her to be most ancient, and the Greeks say she was the daughter of Zeus by Lamia the daughter of Poseidon, and that she was the first woman who chanted oracles, and that she was called Sibyl by the Libyans. The second Herophile was younger than her, but was herself clearly earlier than the Trojan War, for she foretold in her oracles that Helen would be reared in Sparta to the ruin of Asia Minor and Europe, and that Ilium would be taken by the Greeks owing to her. The Delians make mention of her Hymn to Apollo. And she calls herself in her verses not only Herophile but also Artemis, and says she was Apollo’s wedded wife and sister and daughter. This she must have written when possessed by the god. And elsewhere in her oracles she says her father was a mortal but her mother one of the Nymphs of Mount Ida. Here are her lines, “I was the child of a mortal sire and goddess mother, she was a Nymph and Immortal while he eat bread. By my mother I am connected with Mount Ida, and my native place is red Marpessus (sacred to my mother), and the river Aidoneus.” There are still in Trojan Ida ruins of Marpessus, and a population of about 60 inhabitants. The soil all about Marpessus is red and terribly dry. Why in fact the river Aidoneus soaks into the earth, and on its emerging sinks into the ground again, and is eventually altogether lost in it, is I think the thin and porous soil of Mount Ida. Marpessus is 240 stades distant from Alexandria in the Troad. The inhabitants of Alexandria say that Herophile was the Sacristan of Sminthian Apollo, and that she foretold by dream to Hecuba what we know really came about. This Sibyl lived most of her life at Samos, but visited Clarus in Colophonia, Delos, and Delphi, and wherever she went chanted standing on the stone we have already mentioned. Death came upon her in the Troad, her tomb is in the grove of Sminthian Apollo, and the inscription on the pillar is as follows. “Here hidden by stone sepulchre I lie, Apollo’s fate-pronouncing Sibyl I, a vocal maiden once but now for ever dumb, here placed by all-powerful fate, and I lie near the Nymphs and Hermes, in this part of Apollo’s realm.” Near her tomb is a square Hermes in stone, and on the left is water running into a conduit, and some statues of the Nymphs. The people of Erythræ, who are most zealous of all the Greeks in claiming Herophile as theirs, show the mountain called Corycus and the cavern in it in which they say Herophile was born, and they say that she was the daughter of Theodorus (a local shepherd) and a Nymph, and that she was called Idæa for no other reason than that well-wooded places were called by people at that time _Idas_. And the line about Marpessus and the river Aidoneus they do not include in the oracles.