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- For other meanings, see ACIS (disambiguation)
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Acis 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.
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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 BCE[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
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. Jean Cras's opera Polyphème is 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'.
Notes
- ^ Ovid. Metamorphoses xiii. 750–68.
- ^ Hesiod. Theogony; Homer. Iliad.
- ^ Philoxenus of Cythera, Theocritus Idylls VI; Ovid Metamorphoses xiii.750-68.
- ^ Schmitz, Leonhard (1867), "Acis", in Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1, Boston, MA, pp. 13
- ^ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 1.6e
- ^ Scholiast on Theocritus' Idyll VI quoting the historian Duris and the poet Philoxenus of Cythera
- ^ Polyphemus and Galatea in a landscape
- ^ National Gallery of Scotland. Elsheimer changed his mind midway and painted out the figures, rendering the painting a pure landscape. Elsheimer highlights
- ^ Other images of Acis, Galatea and Polyphemus are displayed at the ICONOS site.
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Galatea (nymph) |
References
- Grimal, Pierre (1986). The Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-20102-5.
- Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology: Acis
- Theoi.com: Akis
- Galatea the Nereid in classical literature and art
- This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith (1870).
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