Praxiteles was one of the most talented artists of ancient Greece. In the fourth century BC he made two sculptures of Aphrodite. In one the goddess was modestly veiled. The other showed her nude and coquettishly semi-covering her crotch. The people of Kos bought the former and the people of Knidos the latter. This story, which was formerly attributed to Lucian but is now considered to be of uncertain authorship, describes the extremes of passion the nude inspired after it was placed in a temple to the goddess. The tale reveals the power of art and skill of Praxiteles, whose Knidian Aphrodite is known today from Roman copies. Ancient writers alleged that Praxiteles modelled her on his lover, Phryne, a prostitute who was said to have shown her naked breasts before a jury after she was accused of revelling inappropriately and inventing a new god. She clearly had something of Aphrodite’s divine beauty, for she was acquitted.

I had in mind going to Italy and a swift ship had been made ready for me. It was one of the double-banked vessels which seem particularly to be used by the Liburnians, a race who live along the Ionian Gulf. After paying such respects as I could to the local gods and invoking Zeus, God of Strangers, to assist propitiously in my expedition to foreign parts, I left the town and drove down to the sea with a pair of mules. Then I bade farewell to those who were escorting me, for I was followed by a throng of determined scholars who kept talking to me and parted with me reluctantly. Well, I climbed on to the poop and took my seat near the helmsman. We were soon carried away from land by the surge of our oars and, since we had very favourable breezes astern, we raised the mast from the hold and ran the yard up to the masthead. Then we let all our canvas down over the sheets and, as our sail gently filled, we went whistling along just as loud, I fancy, as an arrow does, and flew through the waves which roared around our prow as it cut through them.

But it isn’t the time to describe at any length the events serious or light of the intervening coastal voyage. But, when we had passed the Cilician seaboard and were in the gulf of Pamphylia, after passing with some difficulty the Swallow-Islands, those fortune-favoured limits of ancient Greece, we visited each of the Lycian cities, where we found our chief pleasure in the tales told, for no vestige of prosperity is visible in them to the eye. Eventually we made Rhodes, the island of the Sun-God, and decided to take a short rest from our uninterrupted voyaging.