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!