“Such are her flanks, and from them descend, like white marble, her glorious thighs, solid and straight, united above beneath their crown.  Then come the legs and the slender feet, so small that I am astounded they can bear so great a weight.”

An Egyptian stela in the Louvre sings the praise of a beautiful woman, a queen who died about 700 B.C., as follows:  “The beloved before all women, the king’s daughter who is sweet in love, the fairest among women, a maid whose like none has seen.  Blacker is her hair than the darkness of night, blacker than the berries of the blackberry bush (?).  Harder are her teeth (?) than the flints on the sickle.  A wreath of flowers is each of her breasts, close nestling on her arms.”  Wiedemann, who quotes this, adds:  “During the whole classic period of Egyptian history with few exceptions (such, for example, as the reign of that great innovator, Amenophis IV) the ideal alike for the male and the female body was a slender and but slightly developed form.  Under the Ethiopian rule and during the Ptolemaic period in Egypt itself we find, for the first time, that the goddesses are represented with plump and well-developed outlines.  Examination of the mummies shows that the earlier ideal was based upon actual facts, and that in ancient Egypt slender, sinewy forms distinguished both men and women.  Intermarriage with other races and harem life may have combined in later times to alter the physical type, and with it to change also the ideal of beauty.” (A.  Wiedemann, Popular Literature in Ancient Egypt, p. 7.)

Commenting on Plato’s ideas of beauty in the Banquet Emeric-David gives references from Greek literature showing that the typical Greek beautiful woman must be tall, her body supple, her fingers long, her foot small and light, the eyes clear and moderately large, the eyebrows slightly arched and almost meeting, the nose straight and firm, nearly—­but not quite—­aquiline, the breath sweet as honey. (Emeric-David, Recherches sur l’Art Statuaire, new edition, 1863, p. 42.)

At the end of classic antiquity, probably in the fifth century, Aristaenetus in his first Epistle thus described his mistress Lais:  “Her cheeks are white, but mixed in imitation of the splendor of the rose; her lips are thin, by a narrow space separated from the cheeks, but more red; her eyebrows are black and divided in the middle; the nose straight and proportioned to the thin lips; the eyes large and bright, with very black pupils, surrounded by the clearest white, each color more brilliant by contrast.  Her hair is naturally curled, and, as Homer’s saying is, like the hyacinth.  The neck is white and proportioned to the face, and though unadorned more conspicuous by its delicacy; but a necklace of gems encircles it, on which her name is written in jewels.  She is tall and elegantly dressed in garments fitted to her body and limbs.