Pygmalion & Galatea

Orpheus tells the story

The version everyone knows comes from Book 10 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and its setting matters. The tale is sung by Orpheus after he has lost Eurydice for the second time and turned away from women. His songs in this book are about gods who love boys and about girls punished for monstrous desires, and Pygmalion sits among them as a man who rejects real women altogether. The Propoetides who disgust him are a short, grim story of their own. They denied that Venus was a goddess, so she made them the first women to sell their bodies. As they lost all shame they hardened, and Ovid says it took little change to turn them into stones. Just before them come the Cerastae of Amathus, men with horns who sacrificed strangers and whom Venus turned into bullocks. Pygmalion's statue, then, is a deliberate reversal: women turned to stone, followed by ivory turned to flesh.

Ovid's details are precise and sensual. The statue is ivory, not marble. Pygmalion brings it shells, pebbles, little birds, flowers, amber and beads, pierces its ears with pearls and lays it on cushions dyed with Tyrian purple. The festival at which he prays is Venus's great day on Cyprus, when heifers with gilded horns are sacrificed. When the statue wakes, the goddess herself attends the wedding, and in the tenth month a child called Paphos is born. The Latin does not clearly fix Paphos's sex, so some translations give a son and others a daughter. The city of Paphos, site of Aphrodite's most famous sanctuary, takes its name from this child.

Older versions: a king, and a statue of Aphrodite

Ovid did not invent Pygmalion, but the earlier Greek tradition looks quite different. Apollodorus mentions Pygmalion as a king of Cyprus whose daughter Metharme married Cinyras, the priest-king of Paphos. Christian writers, Clement of Alexandria and Arnobius, cite the Hellenistic author Philostephanus for a story in which Pygmalion fell in love with an ivory statue of Aphrodite herself and treated it as a lover. Clement uses it as an example of pagan image worship gone wrong. No animation features in these reports. Ovid seems to have joined the lovesick-king story to the theme of transformation, and made the beloved an image of an ideal woman rather than of the goddess.

The family line Ovid builds is dark. From Paphos comes Cinyras, and Cinyras's daughter Myrrha falls in love with her own father and is turned into the myrrh tree, from which Adonis is born. A myth about love brought to life leads, within a generation or two, to incest and then to the beloved of Aphrodite who dies young. Readers who stop at the happy ending miss how Ovid frames it.

This Cypriot sculptor should not be confused with Pygmalion, king of Tyre, the brother of Dido in Virgil's Aeneid, who murdered Dido's husband Sychaeus and drove her to found Carthage. See the Aeneid summary for that figure.

The afterlife of the myth

The name Galatea became standard through eighteenth-century France. Rousseau's short lyric scene Pygmalion (written in the 1760s and staged in 1770) calls the statue Galathée, and the name stuck. In Victorian Britain W. S. Gilbert's comedy Pygmalion and Galatea (1871) was a hit. Edward Burne-Jones painted two series titled Pygmalion and the Image; the second (1875–78) is in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, its four panels named "The Heart Desires", "The Hand Refrains", "The Godhead Fires" and "The Soul Attains". Jean-Léon Gérôme's Pygmalion and Galatea (around 1890, Metropolitan Museum of Art) shows the moment the ivory turns pink from the waist up while the sculptor embraces her.

The story also gave psychology a term. The "Pygmalion effect", named after Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's 1968 study Pygmalion in the Classroom, describes how high expectations can raise performance. It sits beside other borrowed names discussed on the mythology in psychology page.

Modern readings are more uneasy than older ones. Many critics see a fantasy of a woman shaped entirely to a man's wishes, with no voice of her own; in Ovid she never speaks. Shaw's Eliza Doolittle pushes back against her maker, which is part of why his Pygmalion ends without the romance audiences expected. That tension makes the tale a good partner to other transformation myths and to the darker love stories of the tradition.

Ancient sources

• Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.238–297 — the Propoetides turned to stone, Pygmalion's ivory statue, his prayer at Venus's festival on Cyprus, the statue's awakening and the birth of Paphos.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.298–502 — the continuation through Cinyras and Myrrha to the birth of Adonis, which shows where Pygmalion's line leads.
• Apollodorus, Library 3.14.3 — names Pygmalion as a king of Cyprus and father of Metharme, wife of Cinyras.
• Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks 4 — cites Philostephanus for Pygmalion of Cyprus falling in love with an ivory statue of Aphrodite.
• Arnobius, Against the Pagans 6.22 — repeats the same Philostephanus story of the king and the image of Venus.

Frequently asked questions

Is Galatea the statue's name in the original myth?

No. Ovid leaves her unnamed. Galatea, originally the name of a sea nymph loved by the Cyclops Polyphemus, was attached to the statue in the modern period and made popular by Rousseau's Pygmalion.

Is Pygmalion a Greek or a Roman myth?

Both, in a sense. Pygmalion was a figure of Greek Cypriot legend known to Hellenistic writers, but the story of the statue coming to life survives first and fully in Ovid, writing in Latin in the early first century AD.

Was the statue made of marble?

Ovid says ivory. Marble crept in through later paintings and sculptures, which often show a white stone figure on a pedestal.

What does the Pygmalion story have to do with My Fair Lady?

Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion turns the sculptor into a phonetics professor who remakes a flower seller's speech. My Fair Lady (1956) is the musical adaptation of Shaw's play, so it descends from Ovid at two removes.