Galatea (mythology)
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Galatea ("she who is milk-white") was the name of two figures in Greek mythology.
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[edit] Galatea the Nereid nymph
Galatea was a Nereid [1] sea nymph who was yearned for by the Sicilian Cyclops Polyphemus [2]. She, however, loved a Sicilian youth named Acis, whom the giant Polyphemus killed with a boulder in a jealous rage. Distraught, Galatea turned his blood into the River Acis in Sicily.
According to Athenaeus [3], the story was first concocted as a political satire against the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius whose favourite concubine, Galatea, shared her name with a Nereid mentioned by Homer. Others [4] say the story was invented to explain the presence of a shrine dedicated to Galatea on Mount Etna.
[edit] Galatea the statue brought to life
Bibliotheke, the Hellenistic compendium of myth long attributed to Apollodorus, relates[5] the myth of the earlier milky-white Galatea, an ivory statue made by Pygmalion, son of Belus ("lord") in Cyprus, which was brought to life by Aphrodite. Pygmalion was so devoted to the cult of Aphrodite that he made the statue and kept it on his couch. The daimon of the goddess entered into the cult image, and the living Galatea bore Pygmalion Paphus—the eponym of the city of Paphos—and Metharme. Cinyras, perhaps the son of Paphus, [6] but perhaps the successful suitor of Metharme, founded the city of Paphos on Cyprus, under the patronage of Aphrodite, and built the great temple to the goddess there.
Metharme, the wife of Cinyras, was mother of Adonis and, in some accounts, Myrrha, who is ordinarily the mother of Adonis, beloved of Aphrodite.
The story of Pygmalion was told in Ovid's Metamorphoses[7]; however, the statue is never actually named in Ovid's poem, and the name "Galatea" was given to the statue at some later date.
It was commonly rumored[8] in Roman times that Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos, the cult image in her temple at Knidos was so beautiful that at least one admirer arranged to be shut in with it overnight.
The tale of Pygmalion and Galatea was cited by John Gower in book II of his Confessio Amantis (1390), which concerns the subject of Envy.
[edit] Interpretation
The myth incontrovertibly indicates that a cult image of Aphrodite was instrumental in some way in the founding myth of Paphos. It also seems axiomatic, apart from miraculous intervention, that the living representative of a cult image could be none but the chief priestess. Robert Graves gives a socio-political interpretation of the story, as a mythologized overthrow of a matrilineal cult. In his view[9] Pygmalion, the consort of the goddess's priestess at Paphos, kept the cult image of Aphrodite as a means of retaining power during his term, after which, Graves speculates, he refused to give up the goddess's image "and that he prolonged this by marriage with another of Aphrodite's priestesses—technically his daughter, since she was heiress to the throne—who is called Metharme ("change"), to mark the innovation."
Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton: see Pygmalion of Tyre.
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ Hesiod Theogony, Homer Iliad
- ^ Philoxenus of Cythera, Theocritus Idylls VI, Ovid Metamorphoses xiii.750-68
- ^ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 1.6e
- ^ Scholiast on Theocritus' Idyll VI quoting the historian Duris and poet Philoxenus of Cythera
- ^ Bibliotheke, iii.14.3.
- ^ According to the Roman Hyginus, Fabula 142, Cinyras was a son of Paphus, thus legitimate in the patrineal manner, but Bibliotheke makes Cinyras an interloper, arriving with some of his people from Cilicia on the nearest coast of Asia Minor, thus a suitor from outside, in the matrilineal manner. The conflict is instructive.
- ^ Metamorphoses x.243ff.
- ^ Recorded in the second-century dialogue Erotes that is traditionally misattributed to Lucian of Samosata.
- ^ Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 1960, 64.1.
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