The biographer Robin Lane Fox traces her legend back to the Roman authors Pliny (Natural History), Lucian of Samosata and Aelian's Varia Historia.
The episode occasioned an apocryphal exchange that was reported in Pliny's Natural History:[2] "Seeing the beauty of the nude portrait, Alexander saw that the artist appreciated Campaspe (and loved her) more than he.
Fox describes this bequest as "the most generous gift of any patron and one which would remain a model for patronage and painters on through the Renaissance.
The Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca wrote his own play on the Campaspe story, Darlo todo y no dar nada (1651).
In 1819, the painting Générosité d'Alexandre, by Jérôme-Martin Langlois depicted the scene where Alexander the Great gifted Campaspe to Apelles.