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Greece – Galatea
Gilt Silver Medal 44mm (31.87 grams) 0.999 Silver
Rafael’s artistic depiction of the myth of Galatea.
Galatea 1513 Raphael, Greek design around central inscription.
You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
-black_bg.jpg/220px-Falconet_-_Pygmalion_&_Galatee_(1763)-black_bg.jpg) Galatea (Greek: Γαλάτεια; “she who is milk-white”) is a name popularly applied to the statue carved of ivory by Pygmalion of Cyprus, which then came to life in Greek mythology. In modern English, the name usually alludes to that story.
Galatea is also the name of Polyphemus’s object of desire in Theocritus’s Idylls VI and XI and is linked with Polyphemus again in the myth of Acis and Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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 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 daughter 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. 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.
The myth indicates that a cult image of Aphrodite was instrumental in some way in the founding myth of Paphos. It also seems axiomatic, apart from miraculous intervention, that the living representative of a cult image could be none but the chief priestess. Robert Graves gives a socio-political interpretation of the story, as a mythologized overthrow of a matrilineal cult. In his view Pygmalion, the consort of the goddess’s priestess at Paphos, kept the cult image of Aphrodite as a means of retaining power during his term, after which, Graves speculates, he refused to give up the goddess’s image “and that he prolonged this by marriage with another of Aphrodite’s priestesses—technically his daughter, since she was heiress to the throne—who is called Metharme (“change”), to mark the innovation”.
William Moulton Marston drew inspiration from the Galatea myth in creating his allegorical myth of Wonder Woman’s clay birth (Wonder Woman being the “Galatea”), with the intention of expressing that she is a product of her mother’s (Hippolyta) rearing, and therefore displaying much of her mother’s qualities of independence, self sufficiency, strength of character, non-limiting beliefs, etc.
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