Acis and Galatea (mythology)
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- For other meanings, see ACIS (disambiguation)
In Ovid's Metamorphoses (xiii.750-68) Acis was the spirit of the Acis River in Sicily, beloved of the nereid, or sea-nymph,[1] Galatea ("she who is milk-white"). Galatea returned the love of Acis, but a jealous suitor, the Sicilian Cyclops Polyphemus,[2] killed him with a boulder. Distraught, Galatea then turned his blood into the river Acis. The Acis River flowed past Akion (Acium) near Mount Etna in Sicily.
- For more details on this topic, see Galatea (mythology).
The name "Galatea" was also supplied for the wife of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus by a post-classical writer. The story of Pygmalion is also told in Ovid's Metamorphoses.[3] Pygmalion fell in love with an ivory statue he had crafted of his own hands, and in answer to his prayers, the goddess Aphrodite brought it to life and united the couple in marriage. No extant ancient text mentions her name: see Galatea (mythology).
According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Acis was the son of Faunus and the river-nymph Symaethis, daughter of the River Symaethus.
The tale occurs nowhere earlier than in Ovid; it may be a fiction invented by Ovid "suggested by the manner in which the little river springs forth from under a rock" (Smith). According to Athenaeus, ca 200 CE[4] 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 [5] say the story was invented to explain the presence of a shrine dedicated to Galatea on Mount Etna.
A first-century fresco removed from an Imperial villa at Boscotrecase, preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius, and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art[6] shows the three figures as incidents in a landscape.
[edit] From the Renaissance
The tale of Acis and Galatea was familiar from the Renaissance onwards: there are paintings of the subject, sometimes as mythological incidents in a large landscape, by Adam Elsheimer[7] Nicolas Poussin (National Gallery of Ireland), Claude Lorrain (Dresden),[8] Musically, the story was the basis for Lully's Acis et Galatée and Handel's Acis and Galatea.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Hesiod Theogony; Homer Iliad.
- ^ Philoxenus of Cythera, Theocritus Idylls VI; Ovid Metamorphoses xiii.750-68.
- ^ Metamorphoses x.243ff.
- ^ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 1.6e
- ^ Scholiast on Theocritus' Idyll VI quoting the historian Duris and the poet Philoxenus of Cythera
- ^ Polyphemus and Galatea in a landscape
- ^ (National Gallery of Scotland. Elsheimer changed his mind in midstream and painted out the figures, rendering the painting a pure landscape. [1]
- ^ Other images of Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus are displayed at the ICONOS site.
[edit] References
- Grimal, Pierre (1986). The Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-20102-5.
- Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology: Acis
- Theoi.com: Akis
- Galatea the Nereid in classical literature and art
