When Troy has fallen and its women are parcelled out among the victors, one captive queen escapes into another body. The Greek witness is Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE), which records the division of the spoils: Agamemnon got Cassandra, Neoptolemus got Andromache, and Ulysses got Hecuba, the aged widow of Priam. "But some say that Helenus got her, and crossed over with her to the Chersonese" — and there, on that Thracian tongue of land, "there she turned into a bitch", and he buried her at the place "now called the Bitch's Tomb".

The transformation is given in a single clause, without cause or struggle: the queen of Troy becomes a dog, and the shore takes its name from her grave. The primary text leaves it there, one variant among the fates of Priam's house — set beside Laodice, "the fairest of the daughters of Priam", who in the same breath "was swallowed up by a chasm in the earth in the sight of all". Woman to bitch, princess to chasm: the Library files these metamorphoses as the last dispensations of a conquered city.

Frazer's note, appended by the editor, gathers the wider tradition Apollodorus only gestures at — Euripides, Ovid, Quintus Smyrnaeus and others tell the same change — and offers a philologist's guess, that "the fable of the transformation originated in the resemblance of the name Hecuba to the name Hecate", the goddess "attended by dogs". That conjecture is the editor's, not the myth's. The primary Greek witness gives only the deed and the place-name. What grief or fury turns the mother of Hector into a howling dog on a foreign strand, so that even the ground remembers her as the Bitch's Tomb?