Pygmalion

Ovid introduces Pygmalion as a man who has seen the Propoetides, women of his own Cyprus, punished for denying Aphrodite's divinity by being turned into the first prostitutes and then to stone; disgusted by what he takes to be a flaw in women generally, he chooses to live without a wife. His skill as a sculptor does not go dormant, though. He carves a statue of a woman out of snow-white ivory, giving it a beauty no real woman could match, and falls in love with his own creation. He treats it as though it were alive: bringing it small gifts prized by real girls, dressing it in clothing and jewelry, laying it in his bed, and speaking to it as a companion, even as he knows, on some level, that it cannot answer.

At Aphrodite's own festival, the most celebrated day on Cyprus, Pygmalion makes an offering and prays, not quite daring to ask outright for the ivory statue itself, but for a bride like it. Aphrodite, present at her own festival, understands what the prayer really means and signals her favor with a flame that flares three times. Pygmalion returns home, kisses the statue as he always has, and feels the ivory grow warm under his lips. He presses his fingers into it and the material yields like softening wax; the limbs bend under his touch, and where there was hardness there is now the give of living flesh. Ovid has him check his own judgment, afraid he is only imagining what he wants to feel, before the woman opens her eyes to the light and to the man who made her at the same instant, completing the transformation.

Ovid never gives the statue a name, and no other ancient source does either; she is only ever "the ivory girl" or "the maiden" in his own Latin. The name Galatea, now inseparable from the story in modern retellings, opera and film, is a post-classical addition with no basis in any surviving ancient text - a different figure from the sea-nymph Galatea loved by Polyphemus, who belongs to an entirely separate tradition running from Theocritus's pastoral poetry through Ovid's own later book of the Metamorphoses. Ovid does have the couple's union bear a child, a daughter named Paphos, whom he credits as the source of the Cyprian city's name - the same city already bound to Aphrodite's cult by the goddess's own mythic birth from the sea nearby. Apollodorus separately names a Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, whose daughter Metharme bears Adonis to Cinyras.

Pygmalion's ivory woman is not the only artificial being Greek and Roman myth brings to life. Hephaestus builds golden handmaidens with minds of their own to support him at his forge, and molds Pandora herself out of earth and water before the gods breathe life and speech into her; his bronze automaton Talos patrols Crete under his own power rather than a sculptor's touch. Pygmalion's statue is the only one of these figures animated by love rather than a craftsman-god's own design, but the pattern - an artificial body a maker (or a god) brings to life - is one Pygmalion's story shares with several of Hephaestus's own creations rather than inventing on its own.