Galatea (mythology)
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Galatea ("she who is milk-white") was the name of three figures in Greek mythology. Galatea, the Sicilian nereid in love with Acis, is discussed at Acis and Galatea (mythology). The third character is the wife of Lamprus who prayed to Leto that her daughter be turned into a son (see Leucippus.
The name "Galatea" was given to the wife of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus by a post-classical writer. No extant ancient text mentions her name. The story of Pygmalion is told in Ovid's Metamorphoses.[1] 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. She bore him a son Paphus—the eponym of the city of Paphos—and Metharme.
Cinyras, perhaps the son of Paphus,[2] 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.
Bibliotheke, the Hellenistic compendium of myth long attributed to Apollodorus, mentions a daughter of Pygmalion named Metharme.[3] She was the wife of Cinyras, and the mother of Adonis, beloved of Aphrodite. Although Myrrha, daughter of Cinyras, is more commonly named as the mother of Adonis.
It was commonly rumored 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.[4]
[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 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."[5]
Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton: see Pygmalion of Tyre.
[edit] Notes and references
- ^ Metamorphoses x.243ff.
- ^ 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 Syria on the nearest coast of Asia, thus a suitor from outside, in the matrilineal manner. The conflict is instructive.
- ^ Bibliotheke, iii.14.3.
- ^ Recorded in the second-century dialogue Erotes that is traditionally misattributed to Lucian of Samosata.
- ^ Graves, Robert (1960). The Greek Myths, 64.1. ISBN 0140171991.
