> [!cite] > Aulus Gellius. *The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. With an English Translation*. Translated by John C. Rolfe. London: Heinemann Press, 1927; reprinted by the Perseus Digital Library, n.d., <https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:latinLit:phi1254.phi001.perseus-eng1>. --- ‘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*, \[8] 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. \[9] 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 \[10] 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 that he saw at Argos one Arescontes, whose name had been Arescusa; that she had even been married, but presently grew a beard, became a man, and had taken a wife: and that at Smyrna also he had seen a boy who had experienced the same change. I myself in Africa saw Lucius Cossutius, a citizen of Thysdrus, who had been changed into a man on his wedding day and was still living when I wrote this.”’ [[Aulus Gellius, The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. With an English Translation, trans. Rolfe, 1927|(Aulus Gellius ix 4)]] ^841ad5 \[8] Pliny the Elder, *The Natural Histories*, vii. 36. \[9] Caenis was a girl whom her lover Poseidon changed into a man and who was then called Caeneus; see Ovid, *Met.* xii. 171 ff.; Virg. *Aen.* vi. 448. \[10] 171 B.C. --- ‘Pliny also wrote this in the same book: ‘There are persons who from birth are bisexual, whom we call ‘hermaphrodites’; they were formerly termed *androgyni* and regarded as prodigies, but now are instruments of pleasure.’\[11]’ [[Aulus Gellius, The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. With an English Translation, trans. Rolfe, 1927|(Aulus Gellius, ix. 4)]] ^c12ed8 \[11] Pliny the Elder, *The Natural History*, vii. 34. ---