Campaspe

Who is Campaspe?

Campaspe, or Pancaste, was a mistress of Alexander the Great and a prominent citizen of Larissa. She was painted by Apelles, who had the reputation in Antiquity for being the greatest of painters. The episode occasioned an apocryphal exchange that was reported in Pliny's Natural History: "Seeing the beauty of the nude portrait, Alexander saw that the artist appreciated Campaspe more than he. And so Alexander kept the portrait, but presented Campaspe to Apelles." The biographer Robin Lane Fox describes this bequest as "the most generous gift of any patron and one which would remain a model for patronage and painters on through the Renaissance."

Apelles also used Campaspe as a model for his most celebrated painting of Aphrodite "rising out of the sea", the iconic Venus Anadyomene, "wringing her hair, and the falling drops of water formed a transparent silver veil around her form".

No Campaspe appears in the five major sources for the life of Alexander. Fox traces her legend back to the Roman authors Pliny, Lucian of Samosata and Aelian's Varia Historia. They would have it that Campaspe was a prominent citizen of Larissa in Thessaly; Aelian surmised that she initiated the young Alexander in love.