Myth
The story of Pygmalion appeared earliest in a Hellenistic work, Philostephanus' history of Cyprus, "De Cypro". It is retold in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where the king Pygmalion is made into a sculptor who fell in love with an ivory statue he had crafted with his own hands. In answer to his prayers, the goddess Venus, (Aphrodite) brought it to life and united the couple in marriage. This novella remained the classical telling until the end of the seventeenth century. The trope of the animated statue gained a vogue during the eighteenth century.
The daemon of Pygmalion's goddess, animating her cult image, bore him a son Paphus—the eponym of the city of Paphos—and Metharme. Of "this ecstatic relationship," Meyer Reinhold has remarked, "there may be lurking a survival of the ancient cult of the Great Goddess and her consort."
Cinyras, perhaps the son of Paphus, or 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. 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's cult image of Aphrodite of Knidos, in Aphrodite's temple, was so beautiful that at least one admirer arranged to be shut in with it overnight.
Read more about this topic: Galatea (mythology)
Famous quotes containing the word myth:
“That, of course, was the thing about the fifties with all their patina of familial bliss: A lot of the memories were not happy, not mine, not my friends’. That’s probably why the myth so endures, because of the dissonance in our lives between what actually went on at home and what went on up there on those TV screens where we were allegedly seeing ourselves reflected back.”
—Anne Taylor Fleming (20th century)
“The generation of women before us who rushed to fill the corporate ranks altered our expectations of what working motherhood could be, tempered our ambition, and exploded the supermom myth many of us held dear.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)