Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In Ovid’s telling, the Oceanid Clytie loved Helios (Sol). The sun-god preferred her sister-nymph Leucothoe and visited her in disguise. Jealous Clytie betrayed the affair to Leucothoe’s father Orchamus, who buried his daughter alive; Helios could not save her and turned her body into frankincense. Still scorning Clytie, he left her. She wasted on the bare earth, tasting only dew, her eyes fixed on the sun’s path for nine days. At last she rooted where she sat; her limbs became a pale flower—the heliotrope—that forever turns its face to follow the sun across the sky. Greek poetry knows Helios’s many loves and the physical fact of sun-tracking plants; the fully narrated jealousy, betrayal, and metamorphosis survive as **Roman transmission**. The aetiology remains classical in theme: unrequited love of a mortal/nymph for a cosmic god, punished and memorialized as a plant that cannot look away.