Euripides, speaking of course as a poet, pronounces beauty to be worthy of supreme power. But many ancient nations were seriously of this mind, and chose the finest person among them to be their king: which was the practice of those Ethiopians called the Immortals.—Athen. xiii. 20. If by Ethiopians be meant the people now known under the name of Nubians, I am sure they had very good reason to encourage beauty, than which there is, at this day, nothing more rare in their country. Footnote 938: V. 47. It was to its artists that Greece delegated, at least in some instances, the privilege of deciding on the rival pretensions of the fair and beautiful. They were permitted to select from the loveliest women of the land models for their female divinities, and at other times made their mistresses the representatives of goddesses. Pains were taken, by filling their apartments with beautiful statues, to impress upon the imagination of pregnant women the perfect forms of gods and heroes, as of Nireus, Narcissos, Hyacinthos, Castor and Polydeukes, Bacchos and Apollo.[939] This was at Sparta. In other parts of the Peloponnesos a species of Olympic contest for the prize of beauty took place, instituted, it is said, by Cypselos, an ancient king of Arcadia. Having founded a city in the plain on the banks of the Alpheios, in which he fixed a colony of Parrhasians, he dedicated a temple and altar, and instituted a festival in honour of Eleusinian Demeter, during which the women of the neighbourhood disputed with each other the prize, and received from some circumstance connected with the contest the name of Chrysophoræ. The first woman who won was Herodice, wife of the founder Cypselos. This institution flourished upwards of fourteen hundred years, having been established in the time of the Heracleidæ, and still existing in the age of Athenæus.[940] Footnote 939: Opian. Cyneg. i. 357. sqq. Footnote 940: Deipnosoph. xiii. 90. Eustath. ad Il. τ. 282. relates briefly the same facts, concluding with the very words made use of by Athenæus. Palmerius, who, in his remarks on Diogenes Laertius quotes them, immediately adds: “quæ non dubito Eustathiun ab aliquo auctore antiquo accepisse.”—Exercit. in Auct. Græc. p. 448. In which conjecture he was right; and that ancient author was Nicias in his history of Arcadia.