Essays in Portraiture Defended (22-25)

Come then, apply, if you will, both canons to my words, that you may discover whether they conform to this one or the other. If it had been some ugly woman whom I likened to the statue in Cnidos, I might indeed be accounted a liar, and a worse flatterer than Cynaethus. But since it was one whose beauty is known to all, the venture was not a salto mortale.

Perhaps, then, you may say—indeed, you have already said—that you concede my right to praise you for your beauty, but that I should have made my praise unexceptionable and should not have compared a mortal woman with goddesses. As a matter of fact (now she is going to make me speak the truth!) it was not with goddesses I compared you, my dear woman, but with masterpieces of good craftsmen, made of stone or bronze or ivory; and what man has made, it is not impious, I take it,

But if I had actually compared you, as much as you will, with the very goddesses themselves, I should not have been doing it on my own responsibility and should not have been the first to open this road. No, there have been many good poets ahead of me, and above all your fellow-citizen Homer, whom I shall now call up to plead for me, or else there is nothing for it but that he himself will be convicted along with me!

I shall therefore ask him, or, better, ask you in his stead, since you know by heart—and it is greatly to your credit—all the prettiest of the verses that he composed, what you think of him when he says of Briseis, the captive, that as she mourned for Patroclus she resembled golden Aphrodite?[*] Then after a bit, as if it were not enough that she should be like Aphrodite only, he says:

Then made answer, in tears, the maid as fair as a goddess.

Then if he is to be permitted to compare a foreign woman, and in tears at that, with golden Aphrodite, for my part, not to speak of your beauty because you will not listen, may not I compare with images of the gods a radiant woman, usually smiling, a trait which men have in common with the gods?

In the case of Agamemnon, moreover, see how parsimonious Homer was with the gods, and with what propriety he doled out his comparisons! He says that in eyes and head he was like to Zeus, in waist to Ares, and in chest to Poseidon,[*] dismembering the man for the sake of comparing him with all those gods. Again, he says that someone is a match for devastating Ares;[*] and just so with the rest of them—the Phrygian, the son of Priam, is beautiful as a god,[*] and the son of Peleus is often godlike.[*] But I will return to the parallels that concern women. You know, naturally, that he says:

Artemis she resembleth, or else Aphrodite the golden,

Just so Artemis runneth adown the slope of a mountain.