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Acis and Galatea (mythology)

For other meanings, see ACIS (disambiguation)

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Acis (Greek: ) was the spirit of the Acis River in Sicily,^[1] beloved of the nereid, or sea-nymph,^[2] Galatea ( ; "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.

Details
Cultural references
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References

Details

Acis and Galatea by Claude Lorrain

According to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Acis was the son of Faunus and the river-nymph Symaethis, daughter of the River Symaethus.

Polyphemus Surprising Acis and Galatea, by Auguste Ottin (1866), the Fontaine M dicis, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris

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.

Cultural references

Triumph of Galatea ]], based on the homonymous fresco by Rafael Sanzio. 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 Galat e. 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 Polyph me 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'.

File:Parc de Versailles, Bosquet des D mes, Galat e, Jean-Baptiste Tuby 04.jpg|The Nereid Galatea listening with surprise to the shepherd Acis playing his flute. Sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Tuby, 1667-75
(grove fo the Domes, gardens of Versailles) File:Parc de Versailles, Bosquet des D mes, Acis, Jean-Baptiste Tuby 02.jpg|Acis playing the flute. Sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Tuby, 1674
(grove fo the Domes, gardens of Versailles) </gallery>