Excerpta Vaticana (6-10)

They say that Heracles fought Achelous in single combat. But here is how it was: the Achelous flowed between the Aetolians and the Curetes and would cut off great tracts of land, sometimes favouring one tribe and sometimes the other. As a result, a great quarrel arose. Heracles, coming to the Aetolians as an ally, defeated the Curetes and, having confined the river in a single channel and one outlet, he strengthened the land to the advantage of the Aetolians and took away Deianeira, daughter of Oeneus.

Pasiphae, having fallen in love with a young local man, made Daedalus her accomplice and assistant in the affair. Even prior to this, she had been in the habit of watching whenever he was working on something, and so, while he was making a very beautiful statue of a cow, which resembled a living one to a very great extent, she continually went to Daedalus’ house to see the cow and have sex with her lover, until the affair was detected. The stories told about this are mythical.

This is what Plutarch says about the Chimaera in his monograph De Mulierum Virtutibus [248c]: The Chimaera was an east-facing hill, and in summer it produced violent and fiery reflections and flares which, spreading across the plain, would cause the crops to wither. Bellerophon, recognizing this, cut through the smoothest part of the cliff, which was primarily responsible for sending out the reflections.

It is said about him that, after seeing his own reflection in water and falling in love with it, Narcissus leapt into the water to embrace his reflection, and drowned. This is not true. He drowned not in water, but in this way: having seen his own image in the fluid nature of his physical body, that is, his corporeal existence, which is the image most distant from the true soul, and conceiving a desire to embrace this as a part of himself, that is to say, falling in love with life according to this image, he drowned, submerged, having destroyed his true soul, that is to say the life that truly belongs to it—as the saying goes: fearful of his own shadow. This teaches us to be wary of enthusiasm for the most distant thing as if it were the most important thing because this brings about the death of the soul, that is, the destruction of true judgement about things and of the appropriate perfection in it in accordance with reality. So says the author of Proverbial expressions in Plato.

One should know that Alexander, or Paris, did not judge the goddesses but, being clever, he composed an encomium on them. This gave rise to the myth that he decided a contest between Pallas, Hera, and Aphrodite.