Acis and Galatea (mythology)

The story of the love of Acis and the sea-nymph Galatea appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses. There the jealous Cyclops Polyphemus, who also loves Galatea, comes upon them embracing and crushes his rival with a boulder. His destructive passion comes to nothing when Galatea changes Acis into a river spirit as immortal as herself. The episode was made the subject of poems, operas, paintings and statues in the Renaissance and after.

Galatea (Γαλάτεια; "she who is milk-white"), daughter of Nereus and Doris, was a sea-nymph anciently attested in the work of both Homer and Hesiod, where she is described as the fairest and most beloved of the 50 Nereids. In Ovid's Metamorphoses she appears as the beloved of Acis, the son of Faunus and the river-nymph Symaethis, daughter of the River Symaethus. When a jealous rival, the Sicilian Cyclops Polyphemus, killed him with a boulder, Galatea then turned his blood into the Sicilian River Acis, of which he became the spirit. This version of the tale occurs nowhere earlier and may be a fiction invented by Ovid, "suggested by the manner in which the little river springs forth from under a rock". According to Athenaeus, ca 200 CE, 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 the nymph. Others claim the story was invented to explain the presence of a shrine dedicated to Galatea on Mount Etna.

During Renaissance and Baroque times the story emerged once more as a popular theme. In Spain Luis de Góngora y Argote wrote the much admired narrative poem, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, published in 1627. It is particularly noted for its depiction of landscape and for the sensual description of the love of Acis and Galatea. It was written in homage to an earlier and rather shorter narrative with the same title by Luis Carillo y Sotomayor (1611) The story was also given operatic treatment in the very popular zarzuela of Antoni Lliteres Carrió (1708). The atmosphere here is lighter and enlivened by the inclusion of the clowns Momo and Tisbe.

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