Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights
John C. Rolfe, Ed.

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[p. 167] other marvellous men called monocoli, or “one-legged,” who run by hopping with their single leg and are of a most lively swiftness. ¹ And that there are also some others who are without necks and have eyes in their shoulders. But all bounds of wonder are passed by the statement of those same writers, that there is a tribe in farthest India with bodies that are rough and covered with feathers like birds, who eat no food but live by inhaling the perfume of flowers. And that not far from these people is the land of Pygmies, the tallest of whom are not more than two feet and a quarter in height.

These and many other stories of the kind I read; but when writing them down, I was seized with disgust for such worthless writings, which contribute nothing to the enrichment or profit of life. Nevertheless, the fancy took me to add to this collection of marvels a thing which Plinius Secundus, a man of high authority in his day and generation by reason of his talent and his position, recorded in the seventh book of his Natural History, ² not as something that he had heard or read, but that he knew to be true and had himself seen. The words therefore which I have quoted below are his own, taken from that book, and they certainly make us hesitate to reject or ridicule that familiar yarn of the poets of old about Caenis and Caeneus. ³ He says that the change of women into men is not a fiction. “We find,” says he, “in the annals that in the consulship of Quintus Licinius Crassus and Gains Cassius Longinus ⁴ a girl at Casinum was changed into a boy in the house of her parents and by direction of the diviners was deported to a desert island. Licinius Mucianus has stated ”