The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 3 (of 3)Athenaeus, of Naucratis
Philosophy
The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenæus, Vol. 3 (of 3)
Athenaeus, of Naucratis
Civilization, Greco-Roman; Dinners and dining -- Greece; Greece -- Social life and customs; Homosexuality -- Greece
There was, for instance, Thargelia the Milesian, who was married
to fourteen different husbands, so very beautiful and accomplished
was she, as Hippias the Sophist says, in his book which is entitled
Synagoge. But Dinon, in the fifth book of his History of Persia, and
in the first part of it, says that the wife of Bagazus, who was a
sister of Xerxes by the same father, (and her name was Anytis,) was the
most beautiful and the most licentious of all the women in Asia. And
Phylarchus, in his nineteenth book, says that Timosa, the concubine of
Oxyartes, surpassed all women in beauty, and that the king of Egypt had
originally sent her as a present to Statira, the wife of the king.
And Theopompus, in the fifty-sixth book of his History, speaks of
Xenopithea, the mother of Lysandrides, as the most beautiful of all
the women in Peloponnesus. And the Lacedæmonians put her to death,
and her sister Chryse also, when Agesilaus the king, having raised a
seditious tumult in the city, procured Lysandrides, who was his enemy,
to be banished by the Lacedæmonians. Pantica of Cyprus was also a
very beautiful woman; and she is mentioned by Phylarchus, in the tenth
book of his History, where he says that when she was with Olympias,
the mother of Alexander, Monimus, the son of Pythion, asked her in
marriage. And, as she was a very licentious woman, Olympias said to
him—"O wretched man, you are marrying with your eyes, and not with
your understanding." They also say that the woman who brought back
Pisistratus to assume the tyranny, clad in the semblance of Minerva the
Saviour, was very beautiful, as indeed she ought to have been, seeing
that she assumed the appearance of a goddess. And she was a seller of
garlands; and Pisistratus afterwards gave her in marriage to Hipparchus
his son, as Clidemus relates in the eighth book of his Returns, where
he says—"And he also gave the woman, by name Phya, who had been in
the chariot with him, in marriage to his son Hipparchus. And she was
the daughter of a man named Socrates. And he took for Hippias, who
succeeded him in the tyranny, the daughter of Charmus the polemarch,
who was extraordinarily beautiful."
And it happened, as it is said, that Charmus was a great admirer of
Hippias, and that he was the man who first erected a statue of Love in
the Academy, on which there is the following inscription—
O wily Love, Charmus this altar raised
At the well-shaded bounds of her Gymnasium.
Hesiod, also, in the third book of his Melampodia, calls Chalcis in
Eubœa,
Land of fair women;—
for the women there are very beautiful, as Theophrastus also asserts.
And Nymphodorus, in his Voyage round Asia, says that there are nowhere
more beautiful women than those in Tenedos, an island close to Troy.
[Sidenote: PRAISE OF MODESTY.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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