Grief has its own metamorphosis in this record: when the women who mourned Meleager had wept their fill, they "were turned into birds". The change closes one of the darker Greek tragedies of the hearth. The Fates had come to the seven-day-old Meleager and declared that he should die "when the brand burning on the hearth was burnt out"; his mother Althaea snatched the log from the fire and shut it in a chest, and her son grew into an "invulnerable and gallant man". But after the hunt of the Calydonian boar, when Meleager killed his own uncles in a quarrel over the hide, "Althaea kindled the brand", and "Meleager immediately expired".

The transformation the address is filed under sits at the very end, as the mourning women become birds. James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish anthropologist whose edition of the Library (Bibliotheca) — a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE — carries the running commentary, adds in his own note that it was Artemis who changed "the sisters of Meleager into birds" with a touch of her rod, and that these were the "meleagrides, guinea-fowl" that still bear the hero's name.

Only the Greek strand is wired to served text today. The authority gathered at this address reaches much further — it names Ceyx and Alcyone, and Procne and Philomela, among the famous changes of human beings into birds — and the wider shelf lists Irish, Icelandic, Finnish, Indian, Chinese and Pacific witnesses besides; but of the two dozen authorities filed here, only this one page of Apollodorus can be read. If the deepest grief is what turns the mourners into birds, is the change a mercy or a sentence?