Note 6 — THE Metamorphoses of Venus
Reading edition
Priapeia, LXIII: “To her a certain girl (I very nearly gave her name) is wont to come with her paramour; and if she fails to discover as many postures as Philaenis describes, she goes away again still itching with desire.”
Philaenis has found a champion of her good name in Aeschrion, who wrote an epitaph for her that is still extant in Athenaeus, bk. VIII. ch. 13: The last lines read: “I was not lustful for men nor a gad-about; but Polycrates, by race an Athenian, a mill clapper of talk, a foul-tongued sophist, wrote—what he wrote; I know nought of it all.”
Her works were familiar to Timarchus in Lucian (Apophras, p. 158,—vol. VII., of Works of Lucian, edit. J. P. Schmid): “Tell me where you find these words and expressions,—in what books? is it in the volumes of Philaenis, that are always in your hands?”