PARRHA'SIUS, one of the greatest painters of ancient Greece, was the son of Evenor, himself an artist, and was P. at Ephesus in the 5th c. B.C. He practiced his profession, however, at Athens, the inhabitants of which held him in high estimation, and con ferred on him the rights of citizenship. He was alieady celebrated in the time of Socra tes, with whom, according to Xenophon, he held a conversation (Menu. 3, 10), and was also a younger contemporary of Zeuxis. The date of his death is unknown. Seneca, who lived several hundred years after, tells a monstrous story about him. He says that when Parrhasius was painting his "Prometheus Vinctus." lie got hold of one of the prisoners taken at the capture of Olynthus by Philip of Macedon (347 u.c.), and cruci fied him in his studio that he might copy from life the expression of agony. Fortunately for Parrhasins's memory, the anecdote is almost certainly untrue, as it would require us to suppose that he was still alive and painting when upward of a hundred years old. Parrhasius appears to have surpassed all his predecessors in purity of design, accuracy of drawing, force of expression, and what is technically called "finish." According to Pliny, he was the first who established a true proportion between the different parts of a picture, and delineated with elegance and precision all the minutiae of the features, even to those evanescent motions that betray the most delicate sentiments of the soul. He painted the extremities, such as the hands and fingers, in so exquisite a style, that the intermediate parts seemed relatively—but only relatively—infermr. Quinctilian calls
him the legislator of his art, because his canon of proportion for gods and heroes was followed by all contemporary and subsequent painters. Among his works were an apparently symbolical picture of the Athenian Demos (" people"), a "Theseus," "Naval Commander in full Armor," "Ulysses feigning Madness," " Castor and Pollux," " Bac elms and Virtue," a "Meleager, Hercules, and Perseus" on one canvas, a "Cretan Nurse with a Child in her Arms," a "Priest officiating with a Child bearing Incense," "Two Young Children," an "Achilles," an " Agamemnon," etc. But his subjects were not always of a pure or lofty character. His " Archigallus" (high-priest of Cybele) and his " Meleager and Atalanta" were most licentious representations, and gave such pleasure to the emperor Tiberius, a man of unbounded sensuality, that he kept them in his bed room, and valued the second in particular at more than a million sesterc's.
Parrhasins was of an excessively proud and arrogant disposition. He called himself the prince of painters, and claimed to be descended from Apollo; he also painted him self as the god Mercury, and then exposed his own portrait for the adoration of the crowd. His vanity was equal to his pride, and showed itself even in his apparel, which was of the kind called "gorgeous." He generally dressed in a purple robe with a golden fringe, sported a gold-headed cane, and wore boots tied with golden clasps.