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We have Homer, the best of all painters, éven in the presence of Euphranor and Apelles. Let her be throughout of a colour like that which Homer gave to the thighs of Menelaus when he likened them to ivory tinged with crimson;Iliad 4, 141 sqq. and let him also paint the eyes and make her “ox-eyed.” The Theban poet, too, shall lend him a hand in the work, to give her ‘violet brows.”Pindar; the poem in which he applied this epithet to Aphrodite (cf. p. 333) is lost. Yes, and Homer shall make her “laughter-loving” and “white-armed" and “rosy-fingered,” and, in a word, shall liken her to golden Aphrodite far more fittingly than he did the daughter of Briseus.Iliad 19, 282.
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This, then, is what sculptors and painters and poets can achieve; but who could counterfeit the fine flower of it all—the grace; nay, all the Graces in company, and all the Loves, too, circling hand in hand about her?
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POLYSTRATUS It is a miraculous creature that you describe, Lycinus; “dropt from the skies”The Trojan Palladium was “dropt from the skies” according to the myth (Apollodorus 3, 12, 3); so also the image of Athena Tauropolos at Halae in Attica, that was thought to have been brought there from the country of the Taurians where it fell (Euripides, Iph. in Taur. 87, 977, 986). in very truth, quite like something out of Heaven. But what was she doing when you saw her?
