ABSTRACT
In the first part of his Imagines, Lucian (in the guise of Lykinos) provides his friend Polystratus with the description of an unknown lady by whose beauty he was completely overwhelmed. To give an impression of what he saw he turns to the most exquisite masterpieces of the most famous Greek artists of the classical epoch. His friend is then able to guess that the unknown beauty could have been none other than Panthea, the mistress of the emperor Lucius Verus. This description has always been considered as showing Lucian’s connoisseurship of ancient art. This paper approaches the passage from an archaeological perspective and argues that, while it is not to be denied that the author knew the masterpieces he describes very well, what Lucian wrote was not a simple ekphrasis, but rather the parody of an ekphrasis and of the contemporary intellectual discourse on art in the Roman Empire. Lucian also subtly and ironically undermines what might at first glance seem to be the rather servile flattery of a writer trying to gain the emperor’s favour.
