Although, in Hellenistic and later accounts, the Delphic monster slain by Apollo is usually said to be the male serpent Python, in the earliest known account of this story, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (6th century BC), the god kills a nameless she-serpent (drakaina), subsequently called Delphyne.
[6] The Hymn goes on to describe how, while building his oracular temple at Delphi, Apollo encountered the she-serpent near a "sweet flowing spring".
[7] Apollo shot the dragoness with an arrow from his bow,[8] and the monster: Apollonius of Rhodes (early 3rd century BC), says that Apollo "slew with his bow the monster Delphyne", "beneath the rocky ridge of Parnassus", and that the victory was cheered by the "Corycian nymphs", who were associated with the Corycian cave on the slopes of Parnassus above Delphi.
[12] Delphyne also appears in Apollodorus' account (1st or 2nd century AD) of Typhon's battle with Zeus,[13] where she is called both a "she-dragon" (drakaina) and a "half-bestial maiden".
geographical poet Dionysius Periegetes mentions a coil of the serpent Delphyne leaning against Apollo's sacrificial tripod.