BEAUTY OF WOMEN. And in his Io he calls the flowers children of spring, where he says—
Strewing around sweet children of the spring.
And in his Centaur, which is a drama composed in many metres of various kinds, he calls them children of the meadow—
There, too, they did invade the countless host
Of all the new-born flowers that deck the fields,
Hunting with joy the offspring of the meadows.
And in his Bacchus he says—
The ivy, lover of the dance,
Child of the mirthful year.
And in his Ulysses he speaks thus of roses:—
And in their hair the Hours' choicest gifts
They wore, the flowering, fragrant rose,
The loveliest foster-child of spring.
And in his Thyestes he says—
The brilliant rose, and modest snow-white lily.
And in his Minyæ he says—
There was full many a store of Venus to view,
Dark in the rich flowers in due season ripe.
89. Now there have been many women celebrated for their beauty (for, as Euripides says—
E'en an old bard may sing of memory)
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
