Pro imaginibus

Lucian of Samosata

Lucian, Vol. 4. Harmon, A. M., editor. London: William Heinemann, Ltd.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.

Something similar and much more comical was

v.4.p.303

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!

She made fun of all such people as these, who surrender themselves to flatterers, and she added, too, that many wish to be similarly flattered and cozened in portraits as well as in complimentary speeches. “In fact,” said she, “they delight most of all in those painters who make the prettiest pictures of them. And there are some who even direct the artists to take away a little of the nose, or paint the eyes blacker, or give them any other characteristic that they covet; and then, in their blissful ignorance, they hang wreaths of flowers upon portraits of other people, not in the least like themselves!”