Perhaps, then, you may say—indeed, you have already said—that you concede my right to praise you for your beauty, but that I should have made my praise unexceptionable and should not have compared a mortal woman with goddesses. As a matter of fact (now she is going to make me speak the truth!) it was not with goddesses I compared you, my dear woman, but with masterpieces of good craftsmen, made of stone or bronze or ivory; and what man has made, it is not impious, I take it, to compare with man. But perhaps you have assumed that what Phidias fashioned is Athena, and that what Praxiteles made in Cnidus not many years ago is Heavenly Aphrodite? Come now, would it not be unworthy to hold such beliefs about the gods, whose real images I for my part assume to be unattainable by human mimicry?
But if I had actually compared you, as much as you will, with the very goddesses themselves, I should not have been doing it on my own responsibility and should not have been the first to open this road. No, there have been many good poets ahead of me, and above all your fellow-citizen Homer, whom I shall now call up to plead for me, or else there is nothing for it but that he himself will be convicted along with me!
