Three sisters, old from the day they were born, keep house with a single eye and a single tooth between them, passing both from hand to hand as each has need. Whoever catches the treasures in mid-passage holds all three women hostage at once.

The Greek witness is Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), in the story of Perseus. Sent by Polydectes, king of Seriphus, to bring back the Gorgon's head, Perseus is guided by Hermes and Athena to Enyo, Pephredo, and Dino, the Phorcides (daughters of Phorcus), "sisters of the Gorgons" and "old women from their birth". "The three had but one eye" and one tooth, "and these they passed to each other in turn". Perseus strikes at the passing itself: he "got possession of the eye and the tooth" and would only "give them up if they would show him the way to the nymphs". The theft is a lever, not a wound. Shown the way, he "gave them back the tooth and the eye" and went on to collect the nymphs' gear — winged sandals, the kibisis ("which they say was a wallet", as the text glosses the word), and "the cap of Hades" that lets its wearer see without being seen — then took Medusa's head while the Gorgons slept.

The editor's note of Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish scholar whose translation carries this passage, ranges the elder witnesses behind the sisters — Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Ovid among them — and observes that the Perseus legend here seems to follow Pherecydes.

The eye works for whichever sister holds it; blindness is simply whose turn it is not. What does the story know about shared sight — that it sees everything except the hand reaching in to take it?