they were imported into Greece and Italy from
Egypt or Phoenicia; and that their stories were derived from the same
sources; such as those of Adonis, Arethusa, Arachne, and Isis. Those
that are derived from the Greek languages are attached to fictions
of purely Greek origin, such as the fables of Daphne, Galantis,
Cygnus, and the Myrmidons; and where the names are of Latin
original, we may conclude that their stories originated in Italy:
such, for instance, as those of Canens, Picus, Anna Perenna, Flora,
Quirinus, and others.

To this rule there are certain exceptions; for both Greece and Italy
occasionally appropriated each other's traditions, by substituting
the names of one language for those of the other. Thus it would not
be safe to affirm positively that the story of Portumnus and Matuta
is of Latin origin, since Greece lays an equal claim to it under the
names of Leucothoe and Palaemon, while, probably, Cadmus originally
introduced it from Phoenicia, under the names of Ino and Melicerta.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, on the authority of Cato the Censor and
Asellius Sempronius, says that the original inhabitants of Italy
were a Greek colony. Cato and Sempronius state that they were from
Achaia, while Dionysius says that they came from Arcadia, under the
command of Oenotrius. Picus is generally supposed to have been one of
the aboriginal kings of Italy, who was afterwards Deified. Servius,
in his Commentary on the seventh Book of the AEneid, informs us that
Picus pretended to know future events, and made use of a woodpecker,
which he had tamed, for the purpose of his auguries. On this ground,
after his death, it was generally reported that he had been
transformed into that bird, and he was ranked among the Dii
Indigetes of Latium. Dying in his youth, his wife Canens retired to
a solitary spot, where she ended her life, and the intensity of her
grief gave rise to the fable that she had pined away into a sound.

It has been suggested that the story took its rise from the oracles
of Mars among the Sabines, when a woodpecker was said to give the
responses. According to Bochart, it arose from the confusion of the
meaning of the Phoenician word 'picea,' which signified a 'diviner.'
It is the exuberant fancy of Ovid alone which connects Picus with
the story of Circe.

FABLES VII. AND VIII. [XIV.441-526]

Turnus having demanded succour from Diome