Pythionice, the favorite of Harpalus, the friend and confidant of Alexander the Great, partook of honors which rivalled those of Lamia. During the most brilliant period of Harpalus's career, Pythionice was summoned to Babylon, where she shared his honors and bore the title of a queen of Babylon. A letter from the historian Theopompus to Alexander is extant, in which he speaks of the passionate devotion of Harpalus to his favorite, and thus alludes to her: "To this Pythionice, a slave of the flute player Bacchis, who in turn was a slave of the hetaera Sinope, Harpalus erected two monuments, one at Athens and one at Babylon, at a cost of more than two hundred talents, which seemed cheap to that spend-thrift; and, in addition, he had a precinct and a sanctuary dedicated to her, which he named the temple and altar of Aphrodite Pythionice. She bore him a daughter, and died before the sudden change which came in his fortunes." Another favorite of Harpalus, and later of the celebrated deformed comic poet Menander, was Glycera, the daughter of Thalassis. She was a native of Athens, and passed most of her time in the company of litterateurs and philosophers. The Megarian philosopher Stilpo once accused her, at a banquet, of misleading the youth through her seductive art. She made the reply: "Stilpo, we are in this under like condemnation. It is said of you that you impart to your pupils profitless and eristic sophisms, of me that I teach them erotic sophisms." Some of Glycera's letters to her poet lover Menander, still extant, show how warm a sympathy existed between the two, and how delicate a sentiment could characterize such a union. One of the names of hetaerae famous in both ancient and modern times is that of Lais, which belonged to two Greek women celebrated for their extraordinary beauty, who are differentiated by being known as Lais the Elder and Lais the Younger. The elder and indisputably more famous of the two was the daughter of that hetaera, Timandra, who remained faithful to Alcibiades in his evil fortunes. As a seven-year-old maiden, Lais was taken captive by the Athenians during the sack of her birthplace, Hyccara in Sicily, and was brought as a slave to Corinth. Here she was early initiated into the arts of gallantry and was given a thorough training in the culture of the day. The physical charms of Lais developed into a beauty rarely witnessed. Her bosom was of such indescribable perfection that sculptors and painters took it as a model in their creations of the ideal female form. She was regarded as surpassing not only all her contemporaries, but also all the famous beauties of earlier times; and later ages regarded her as the prototype of womanly beauty, and delighted in giving lengthy and minute descriptions of her charms, as, for example, that by the sophist Aristaenetus in the first of his fifty erotic epistles.