" What had the Romans been thinking, with their Venus? Love ought to have been a man, tall and broad and glistening as he broke the surface, not to drift about on an insipid clamshell as the painters had it, but to stride under his own power out of the waves up onto land, the ocean’s bounty made manifest for every woman in a fifty-mile radius. "

― Cecilia Grant , A Lady Awakened (Blackshear Family, #1)