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,


 

to compare with man. But perhaps you have
assumed that what Phidias fashioned is Athena,
and that what Praxiteles made in Cnidus not many
years ago is Heavenly Aphrodite ? Come now, would
it not be unworthy to hold such beliefs about the
gods, whose real images I for my part assume to
be unattainable by human mimicry ?