| Sumario: | The two intriguing passages from the Anna Comenna’s Alexiad, a masterpiece of the Byzantine historiography, are the subject-matter of the present paper. It is argued that in these fine examples of rhetorical descriptio the most original is the writer’s decision to compare the physical appearance of Maria of Alania and Irene Ducaena to beauty of ancient statues and paintings of Phidias and Apelles. This step was was dictated by Anna’s effort to make the reader aware of how beautiful the said empresses were; most likely, her point of departure was based on a conviction that her addressee would better understand and “see” her enthusiastic delight in female beauty by remembering and seeing glamour and spell of ancient sculptures, still present and visible in Byzantium in the time of the princess Anna.
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