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? Iliad19, 282. 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. Respectively Zoilus the Homeromastix and Aristarchus of Alexandria, the grammarian. 
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?