| Greek deities series |
|
|---|---|
| Primordial deities | |
| Titans and Olympians | |
| Chthonic deities | |
| Personified concepts | |
| Other deities | |
| Aquatic deities | |
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Acis (Greek: Άκις) was the spirit of the Acis River in Sicily,[1] beloved of the nereid, or sea-nymph,[2] Galatea (Γαλάτεια; "she who is milk-white"). Galatea returned the love of Acis, but a jealous suitor, the Sicilian Cyclops Polyphemus,[3] 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.
Contents |
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".[4] According to Athenaeus, ca 200 CE[5] the story was first concocted as a political satire against the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse, whose favourite concubine, Galatea, shared her name with a nereid mentioned by Homer. Others[6] claim 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[7] shows the three figures as incidents in a landscape.
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.[8] Nicolas Poussin (National Gallery of Ireland), and Claude Lorrain (Dresden).[9]
In music, the story was the basis for Lully's Acis et Galatée. Handel created both Acis and Galatea and Aci, Galatea e Polifemo on the story and Antonio de Literes wrote the zarzuela Acis y Galatea. Nicola Porpora's opera Polifemo and Jean Cras's opera Polyphème are also based on the story.
Claude Lorrain's painting of Acis and Galatea inspired Fyodor Dostoevsky's description of the 'Golden Age'; explicitly in 'A Raw Youth' and in Stavrogin's dream in 'The Devils', and implicitly in 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man'.