Two Greek witnesses, one terse, one operatic, agree on the mechanism: the raven is blackened for telling. In Apollodorus, when Coronis preferred a mortal to Apollo, "Apollo cursed the raven that brought the tidings" and "made him black instead of white, as he had been before" [The Library (Bibliotheca), BOOK III, ch. X]; Frazer's note tallies the ancients who relate the story of the "tell-tale raven and his punishment" [ibid., editor's note]. Ovid gives the bird a full legal history: "His tongue was the cause of his disgrace"; "the color which was white is now the reverse of white" [The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Book 2]. Ovid alone supplies the ignored warning — the crow, herself demoted for tattling, tells him "Thou art going on a fruitless errand" — and the formal sentence after the god's grief: the raven may not "perch any longer among the white birds" [ibid.]. The etiology is a jurisprudence of informers: the raven reports the truth, the truth kills Coronis on Apollo's own arrow, and the plumage keeps the record of where the blame was filed.