Essays in Portraiture (12-14)

LYCINUS Well then, Polystratus, trade me description for description, giving, as the saying goes, measure for measure, or even better than that, since you can. Do a likeness of her soul and display it to me, so ‘that I need not admire her by halves.

POLYSTRATUS It is no light task, my friend, that you are setting me; for it is not the same thing to laud what is manifest to all, and to reveal in words what is invisible. I think that I too shall need fellow-workmen for the portrait, philosophers as well as sculptors and painters, so that I can make my work of art conform to their canons and can exhibit it as modelled in the style of the ancients.

Come now, imagine it made. It will be “gifted with speech,”[*] first of all, and “clear-voiced”;[*] and Homer’s phrase “sweeter than honey from the tongue” applies to her rather than to that old man from Pylos.[*] The whole tone of her voice is as soft as can be; not deep, so as to resemble a man’s, nor very high, so as to be quite womanish and wholly strengthless, but like the voice of a boy still immature, delicious and winning, that gently steals into

the ear, so that even after she has ceased the sound abides, some remnant of it lingering and filling the ears with resonance, like an echo that prolongs audition and leaves in the soul vague traces of her words, honey-sweet and full of persuasion. And when she lifts that glorious voice in song, above all to the lyre, then—ah, then it is the hour for halcyons and cicadas and swans to hush forthwith; for they are one and all unmelodious as against her, and even Pandion’s daughter, should you mention her, is an inexpert amateur, however “soundful” the voice that she pours out.[*]

And as for Orpheus and Amphion, who exercised so very potent a spell upon their auditors that even inanimate things answered the call of their song, they themselves in my opinion would have abandoned their lyres, had they heard her, and would have stood by in silence, listening. That scrupulous observance of time, so that she makes no mistakes in the rhythm, but her singing throughout keeps measure with a beat that is accurate in its rise and fall,[*] while her lyre is in full accord, and her plectrum keeps pace with her tongue; that delicacy of touch; that flexibility of modulations—how could all this be attained by your Thracian, or by that other who studied lyre-playing on the slopes of Cithaeron in the intervals of tending cattle?[*]

Therefore, if ever you hear her sing, Lycinus, not only will you have learned by experience, through being turned into stone, what the Gorgons can do,

but you will know also what the effect of the Sirens was like; for you will stand there enchanted, I know right well, forgetful of country and of kin; and if you stop your ears with wax, the song, in spite of you, will slip through the very wax! Such music is it, a lesson learned of some Terpsichore or Melpomene, or of Calliope herself, fraught with a thousand witcheries of every sort. I may sum it up by saying: “Imagine that you are listening to such singing as would naturally come from such lips and from those teeth.” You yourself have seen the lady in question, so consider that you have heard her.