Defence of the ‘portrait-study’ (7)

And so she went on, finding much in your composition to approve, but displeased in particular with your likening her to Hera and Aphrodite. Such comparisons are far too high for me, she said, or indeed for any of womankind. Why, I would not have had you .ut me on a level with women of the Heroic Age, with a Penelope, an Arete, a Theano; how much less with the chief of the Goddesses. Where the Gods are concerned (she continued;

and mark her here), I am very apprehensive and timid. I fear that to accept a panegyric like this would be to make a Cassiopeia of myself; though indeed she only challenged the Nereids, and stopped short of Hera and Aphrodite.