Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 3).djvu/164

 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.

90. I am aware, too, that on one occasion there was a contest of beauty instituted among women. And Nicias, speaking of it in his History of Arcadia, says that Cypselus instituted it, having built a city in the plain which is watered by the Alpheus; in which he established some Parrhasians, and consecrated a plot of sacred ground and an altar to Ceres of Eleusis, in whose festival it was that he had instituted this contest of beauty. And he says that the woman who gained the victory in this contest was Herodice. And