In his allegorical picture of the People of Athens, he has displayed singular ingenuity in the treatment of his subjects; for in representing it, he had to depict it as at once fickle, choleric, unjust, and versatile; while, again, he had equally to show its attributes of implacability and clemency, compassionateness and pride, loftiness and humility, fierceness and timidity—and all these at once. He painted a Theseus also, which was formerly in the Capitol at Rome, a Naval Commander wearing a cuirass, and, in one picture, now at Rhodes, figures of Meleager, Hercules, and Perseus. This last painting, though it has been thrice struck by lightning, has escaped being effaced, a circumstance which tends to augment the admiration which it naturally excites. He painted an Archigallus[232] also, a picture which the Emperor Tiberius greatly admired. According to Deculo, that prince had it shut up in his chamber, the price at which it was valued being six hundred thousand sesterces. Parrhasius also painted a Thracian Nurse, with an Infant in her arms, a Philiscus, a Father Liber attended by Virtue, Two Children, in which we see portrayed the careless simplicity of childhood, and a Priest attended by a Boy, with a censer and chaplet. There are also two most noble pictures by him; one of which represents a Runner contending for the prize, completely armed, so naturally depicted that he appears covered with perspiration. In the other we see the Runner taking off his armor, and can fancy that we hear him panting aloud for breath. His Æneas, Castor, and Pollux, all represented in the same picture, are highly praised, as well as his Telephus, Achilles, Agamemnon, and Ulysses. Parrhasius was a most prolific artist, but at the same time there was no one who enjoyed the glory conferred upon him by his talent with greater arrogance. He went so far as to call himself “Habrodiætus” (Liver-in-Luxury), and the “prince of painters,” and asserted that in him the art had arrived at perfection. He boasted that he had sprung from the lineage of Apollo, and that he had painted his Hercules, a picture now at Lindos, just as he had often seen him in his sleep. Upon being defeated by Timanthes, at Samos, by a great majority of votes, the subject of the picture being Ajax and the Award of the Arms,[233] he declared in the name of his hero, that he felt himself quite disgraced on thus seeing himself a second time defeated by an unworthy opponent.