Guests at a Banquet, tempera facsimile by Nina de Garis Davies after a fourteenth-century-bc Egyptian frieze, c. 1920. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1930.
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Miscellany
A 2013 study involving American college students found that participants were more likely to deem a face more attractive if it was presented amid a group of faces than if it was displayed alone. This “cheerleader effect,” scientists ventured, was “due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.” Two years later a similar study conducted with Japanese participants failed to replicate the results of the initial study.
Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BC
