BOOK XXXV. XXXVI. 96-98 



also did a Neoptolemus " on Horseback fighting 

 against the Persians, an Archelaus ^ with his Wife 

 and Daughter, and an Antigonus ^ with a Breast- 

 plate marching with his horse at his side. Connois- 

 seurs put at the head of all his works the portrait of 

 the same king seated on horseback, and his Artemis 

 in the midst of a band of Maidens offering a Sacrifice, 

 a work by which he may be thought to have surpassed 

 Homer's verses ^ describing the same subject. He 

 even painted things that cannot be represented in 

 pictures — thunder, Hghtning and thunderbolts, the 

 pictures known respectively under the Greek titles 

 of Bronte, Astrape and Ceraunobolia. 



His inventions in the art of painting have been 

 useful to all other painters as well, but there was one 

 which nobody was able to imitate : when his works 

 were finished he used to cover them over with a black 

 varnish of such thinness that its very presence, while 

 its reflexion threw up the briUiance of all the colours 

 and preserved them from dust and dirt, was only visible 

 to anyone who looked at it close up, but also employ- 

 ing great calculation of lights, so that the brilliance of 

 the colours should not offend the sight when people 

 looked at them as if through muscovy-glass and so 

 that the same device from a distance might invisibly 

 give sombreness to colours that were too brilliant. 



Contemporary with Apelles was Aristides ^ of Aruiides. 

 Thebes. He was the first of all painters who depicted 

 the mind and expressed the feelings of a human 



•* Odyssey VI, 102 fiF., which describe Artemis and maidens 

 wildly ranging amongst boars and deer, not sacrificing. The 

 mistake arises from the two verbs dvo}. 



* The vounger, grandson of Aristides, of. § 75 and note on 

 pp. 410 and 411. 



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