Aetion
2. A celebrated painter, spoken of by Lucian (De Merced. Cond. 42, Herod. or Aetion, 4, &c., Imag. 7), who gives a description of one of his pictures, representing the marriage of Alexander and Roxana. This painting excited such admiration when exhibited at the Olympic games, that Proxenidas, one of the judges, gave the artist his daughter in marriage. Action seems to have excelled particularly in the art of mixing and laying on his colours. It has commonly been supposed that he lived in the time of Alexander the Great; but the words of Lucian (Herod. 4) shew clearly that he must have lived about the time of Hadrian and the Antonines. (K. O. Müller, Arch. der Kunst. p. 240; Kugler, Kunstgeschichte, p. 320.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.