Of his many portraits of the great conqueror four are specifically mentioned by our authorities.  One of these represented the king as holding a thunderbolt, i.e., in the guise of Zeus—­a fine piece of flattery.  For this picture, which was placed in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, he is reported, though not on very good authority, to have received twenty talents in gold coin.  It is impossible to make exact comparisons between ancient and modern prices, but the sum named would perhaps be in purchasing power as large as any modern painter ever received for a work of similar size. [Footnote:  Nicias, an Athenian painter and a contemporary of Apelles, is reported to have been offered by Ptolemy, the ruler of Egypt, sixty talents for a picture and to have refused the offer.] It has been mentioned above that Apelles made a number of portraits of King Philip.  He had also many sitters among the generals and associates of Alexander; and he left at least one picture of himself.  His portraits were famous for their truth of likeness, as we should expect of a great painter in this age.

An allegorical painting by Apelles of Slander and Her Crew is interesting as an example of a class of works to which Lysippus’s statue of Opportunity belonged (page 239).  This picture contained ten figures, whereas most of his others of which we have any description contained only one figure each.

His most famous work was an Aphrodite, originally placed in the Temple of Asclepius on the island of Cos.  The goddess was represented, according to the Greek myth of her birth, as rising from the sea, the upper part of her person being alone distinctly visible.  The picture, from all that we can learn of it, seems to have been imbued with the same spirit of refinement and grace as Praxiteles’s statue of Aphrodite in the neighboring city of Cnidus.  The Coans, after cherishing it for three hundred years, were forced to surrender it to the emperor Augustus for a price of a hundred talents, and it was removed to the Temple of Julius Caesar in Rome.  By the time of Nero it had become so much injured that it had to be replaced by a copy.

Protogenes was another painter whom even the slightest sketch cannot afford to pass over in silence.  He was born at Caunus in southwestern Asia Minor and flourished about the same time as Apelles.  We read of his conversing with the philosopher Aristotle (died 322 B.C.), of whose mother he painted a portrait, and of his being engaged on his most famous work, a picture of a Rhodian hero, at the time of the siege of Rhodes by Demetrius (304 B.C.).  He was an extremely painstaking artist, inclined to excessive elaboration in his work.  Apelles, who is always represented as of amiable and generous character, is reported as saying that Protogenes was his equal or superior in every point but one, the one inferiority of Protogenes being that he did not know when to stop.  According to another anecdote Apelles, while profoundly