Tears of pity flowed from her eyes, and inside her a smoldering pain wore her down, running through her body, around the fine nerves and up to the nape of the neck at the base of the head, where pain sinks in sharpest whenever the tireless Loves drive their pangs into the heart.

Love is described here as a doctor would describe it. The pain smolders through her body, along the fine ἶνες, sinews or nerves, up to the ἰνίον. Mooney explains the ἰνίον as the great tendon at the back of the neck that holds up the head, the part Aristotle names in his account of the skull (History of Animals 1.7), and admits that this physical precision "mars for us the beauty of the passage." Apollonius worked in Alexandria, where in the same century the doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus dissected the human body, as Celsus records in the preface to his On Medicine. The Loves come in the plural, Ἔρωτες, as they often do in Hellenistic poetry (Mooney, note on 3.452).