Asteria's transformation, fleeing Zeus, into a quail and then into the floating island first called Ortygia gave Greek geography a small but persistent puzzle, because more than one place in the Greek world carried the same evocative name and the same claim to sacred significance. Delos itself was known by the alternate name Ortygia in connection with Asteria's myth, but a separate and rival tradition located the birth of Artemis, rather than her twin Apollo, at a different Ortygia near Ephesus in Asia Minor, a sacred grove associated with the great temple of Artemis there, so two significant sanctuaries, geographically far apart, both claimed the quail-island name and, with it, a share of the divine birth story the myth of Asteria was ultimately used to explain. A third location, the small island in the harbor of Syracuse in Sicily, also bore the name Ortygia and its own local foundation legends, unconnected to the Titaness but drawing on the same root word for quail, illustrating how an evocative name and its associated myth could be exported and reattached to new places by Greek colonists far from the Aegean.
Ancient sources themselves show no anxiety about resolving which Ortygia was the real one, treating the name as available to more than one sacred landscape rather than as a single, unrepeatable place name, a habit of religious geography that modern readers, used to expecting one canonical location for a mythic event, sometimes find harder to accept than the ancient Greeks evidently did. Asteria's own myth, in other words, did not just explain one island's origin but supplied a template, a Titaness fleeing into the sea and becoming sacred ground, that different Greek communities could each claim for their own local geography.