Essays in Portraiture Defended (24)

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.

Iiad19, 286 When he says that sort of thing, do you loathe him and fling away the book, or do you permit him to enjoy full freedom in his praise? Well, even if you refuse permission, at all events Time in his long flight has given it, and nobody has found fault with Homer on that score, neither the man who made bold to flog his statue nor the man who marked the spurious lines by setting daggers beside them.[*]

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?