Pro imaginibus

Perhaps, then, you may say—indeed, you have already said—that you concede my right to praise you for your beauty, but that I should have made my praise unexceptionable and should not have compared a mortal woman with goddesses. As a matter of fact (now she is going to make me speak the truth!) it was not with goddesses I compared you, my dear woman, but with masterpieces of good craftsmen, made of stone or bronze or ivory; and what man has made, it is not impious, I take it,

to compare with man. But perhaps you have assumed that what Phidias fashioned is Athena, and that what Praxiteles made in Cnidus not many years ago is Heavenly Aphrodite ? Come now, would it not be unworthy to hold such beliefs about the gods, whose real images I for my part assume to be unattainable by human mimicry ?

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 :

1. 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?