King Attalus gave one hundred talents,[1176] at a public auction, for a single picture of Aristides, the Theban painter.[1177] Cæsar, the Dictator, purchased two pictures, the Medea and the Ajax of Timomachus, for eighty talents,[1178] it being his intention to dedicate them in the temple of Venus Genetrix. King Candaules gave its weight in gold for a large picture by Bularchus, the subject of which was the destruction of the Magnetes. Demetrius, who was surnamed the “taker of cities,”[1179] refused to set fire to the city of Rhodes, lest he should chance to destroy a picture of Protogenes, which was placed on that side of the walls against which his attack was directed. Praxiteles[1180] has been ennobled by his works in marble, and more especially by his Cnidian Venus, which became remarkable from the insane love which it inspired in a certain young man,[1181] and the high value set upon it by King Nicomedes, who endeavoured to procure it from the Cnidians, by offering to pay for them a large debt which they owed. The Olympian Jupiter day by day bears testimony to the talents of Phidias,[1182] and the Capitoline Jupiter and the Diana of Ephesus to those of Mentor;[1183] to which deities, also, were consecrated vases made by this artist. CHAP. 40. (39.)—SLAVES FOR WHICH A HIGH PRICE HAS BEEN GIVEN. The highest price ever given for a man born in slavery, so far as I am able to discover, was that paid for Daphnus, the grammarian, who was sold by Natius of Pisaurum[1184] to M. Scaurus, the first man in the state, for seven hundred thousand sesterces.[1185] In our day, no doubt, comic actors have fetched a higher price, but then they were purchasing their own freedom. In the time of our ancestors, Roscius, the actor, gained five hundred thousand sesterces annually. Perhaps, too, a person might in the present instance refer to the case of the army commissary[1186] in the Armenian war, which was of late years undertaken in favour of Tiridates; which officer, in our own time, received his manumission from Nero for the sum of thirteen million sesterces;[1187] but, in this case, the consideration was the profit to be derived from the war,[1188] and it was not the value of the man that was paid for. And so, too, when Lutorius Priscus bought of Sejanus, the eunuch, Pæzon, for fifty million sesterces,[1189] the price was given, by Hercules! rather to gratify the passion of the purchaser, than in commendation of the beauty of the slave. Universal sorrow and consternation then reigning, the public were too much pre-occupied with it to put a stop to a bargain of so scandalous a nature.[1190] CHAP. 41. (40.)—SUPREME HAPPINESS.