No form, no colour from the visible world, penetrated the darkness surrounding him, not even the image of the woman he loved.  Only his ears enabled him to receive the praises, honours, congratulations lavished here and, though he sometimes thought he had received enough, he again listened willingly and intently when a new speaker addressed him in warm words of eulogy.  What share compassion for his unprecedentedly sorrowful fate had in this extravagantly laudatory and cordial greeting, he did not ask; he only felt with a throbbing heart that he now stood upon a summit which he had scarcely ventured to hope ever to attain.  His dreams of outward success which had not been realized, because he deemed it treason to his art to deviate from the course which he believed right and best adapted to it, he now, without having yielded to the demands of the old school, heard praised as his well-earned possessions.

He felt as if he breathed the lighter, purer air of the realms of the blessed, and the laurel crown which the Queen’s envoy pressed upon his brow, the wreaths which his fellow-artists presented to him by hands no less distinguished than those of the great sculptor Protogenes, and Nicias, the most admired artist after the death of Apelles, seemed, like the wings on the hat and shoes of Hermes, messenger of the gods, to raise him out of himself and into the air.

Darkness surrounded him, yet a bright dazzling light issued from his soul and illuminated his whole being with the warm golden radiance of the sun.

Not even the faintest shadow dimmed it until Soteles, his fellow-student at Rhodes, who sustained him with ardent earnestness in the struggle to prefer truth to beauty, greeted him.

He welcomed him and wished that he might recover his lost sight as warmly as his predecessors.  He praised the Demeter, too, but added that this was not the place to say what he missed in her.  Yet that she did lack it awakened in him an emotion of pain, for this, Hermon’s last work, apparently gave the followers of the ancients a right to number him in their ranks.

His cautious expression of regret must refer to the head of his Demeter.  Yet surely it was not his fault that Daphne’s features bore the impress of that gentle, winning kindness which he himself and Soteles, imitating him, had often condemned as weak and characterless.

The correctness of his belief was instantly proved to him by the address of gray-haired, highly praised Euphranor, who spoke of the Demeter’s countenance with warm admiration.  And how ardently the poets Theocritus and Zenodotus extolled his work to the skies!

Amid so much laudation, one faint word of dissatisfaction vanished like a drop of blood that falls into a clear stream.

The welcome concluded with a final chant by the chorus, and continued to echo in Hermon’s ears as he entered his uncle’s chariot and drove away with him, crowned with laurel and intoxicated as if by fiery wine.