Chelone
Χελώνη
(Χελώνη), the tortoise. When all the gods, men, and animals were invited by Hermes to attend the wedding of Zeus and Hera, the nymph Chelone alone remained at home, to shew her disregard of the solemnity. But Hermes then descended from Olympus, threw Chelone's house, which stood on the bank of a river, together with the nymph, into the water, and changed her into a tortoise, who had henceforth to carry her house on her back. (Serv. ad Aen. 1.509.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.