On Unbelievable Stories (42)

They say that Io was a woman who was turned into a cow and, goaded by a gadfly, she crossed the sea from Argos and came to Egypt. This is implausible: the very idea that...[*] she could survive so many days without food!

The truth is as follows. Io was the daughter of the king of Argos. The people from the city did her the honour of making her priestess of Argive Hera. She fell pregnant and, afraid of her father and the townspeople, fled the city. The Argives went out searching, and, had they found her anywhere, would have apprehended her and put her in chains. [*] So they would say, She’s like a cow: she’s goaded and she flees....[*] In the end, she handed herself over to some foreign traders and begged them to take her to Egypt. After arriving there she gave birth. And so the myth was fabricated.