Alongside her role as patroness of history, Clio has a distinct and less often repeated myth recorded by the mythographer Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca: that Clio once mocked Aphrodite for her infatuation with the mortal youth Adonis, and Aphrodite, in retaliation, caused Clio herself to fall in love with a mortal man, Pierus, son of Magnes. From this union, according to Apollodorus, Clio bore a son named Hyacinthus, a figure distinct from the better known Hyacinthus beloved by Apollo, whose beauty in turn drew the love of the musician Thamyras, setting off a further chain of desire and misfortune in the genealogy Apollodorus records. The episode casts Clio, ordinarily a rather abstract personification of historical memory and fame, into the same pattern of divine punishment through enforced mortal love that Aphrodite metes out to several other figures across Greek myth who slight her or her favorites.
The story survives only in this single mythographic source and receives no elaboration in earlier poetry, so classicists generally treat it as a comparatively late genealogical accretion, useful chiefly for connecting Clio to a minor line of descent involving Hyacinthus and Thamyras rather than as evidence of any earlier, independent cult tradition concerning Clio's romantic life. It nonetheless shows that even the Muse most associated with sober historical record was not exempt from the same currents of desire, jealousy and consequence that run through the wider mythology surrounding Aphrodite.