Essays in Portraiture Defended (5)

Something similar and much more comical was

done, she said, by Stratonice, the wife of Seleucus, who set a competition for the poets, with a talent as the prize, to see which of them could best praise her hair, in spite of the fact that she was bald and had not even a paltry few hairs of her own. Nevertheless, with her head in that pitiful state, when everybody knew that a long illness had affected her in that way, she listened to those rascally poets while they called her hair hyacinthine, and platted soft braids of it, and compared to wild parsley what did not even exist at all!