an irrational dislike for the picture", writing that "The face and attitude of that unseductive Venus... opposite her snoring lover, seems to symbolize the indignities which women have to endure from insolent and sottish boys with only youth to recommend them." One dissenting interpretation is from Charles Dempsey, who finds a more sinister meaning in the picture, with the little satyrs as incubi who torment sleepers, provoking "sexual terrors in the dreams of those bound in a state of sensual error and confusion." He concludes that "The idea of love here invested in Venus seems to be revealed, not in a positive celebration of the spirit animating natural life shown in the Primavera and Birth of Venus but as an empty sensual fantasy that disarms and torments the slumbering spirit of a once virile martial valour. The work is agreed by all to draw on the description by Lucian, a poet in Greek of the 2nd-century AD, of a famous painting, now lost, by Echion of the wedding ceremony of Alexander the Great and Roxana. The ancient painting probably adapted iconography associated with Venus and Mars to the historical Alexander and his bride. Lucian's ekphrasis or description mentions amoretti or putti playing with Alexander's armour during the ceremony, two carrying his lance and one who has crawled inside his breastplate. This is taken both as evidence of Botticelli's collaboration with Humanist advisors with the full classical education that he lacked, and his keenness to recreate the lost wonders of ancient painting, a theme in the interpretation of several of his secular works, most clearly in the Calumny of Apelles, which also uses Lucian. A Roman sarcophagus in the Vatican is carved with a similar Mars and Venus reclining, accompanied by putti. The position of the main figures reflects the description of them by Lucretius in de rerum natura ("The Nature of Things"): "though Mars the War Lord rules war’s savage works, yet often he throws himself into your arms, faint with love’s deathless wound, and there, with arching neck bent back, looks up and sighs, and feeds a lustful eye on you and, pillowed, dangles his life’s breath from your lips. Then, as he falls back on your sacred body, Lady, lean over and let sweet utterance pour from your holy lips—a plea of peace for Rome." In 2010, the plant held by the satyr in the bottom right corner