De Cypro
Philostephanus | history | third century B.C.
Metamorphoses
Ovid | narrative poem | first century A.D.
Apparently in the ancient world, statues could drive men wild. In De Cypro, a third-century B.C. history of Cyprus, Philostephanus tells the story of King Pygmalion, who falls in love with a venerated statue of Aphrodite. Overcome by infatuation, Pygmalion lays the marble on a couch, embraces it and engages in intercourse. In the second-century A.D. Greek dialogue Amores,one of many classical retellings of the story, a young man becomes smitten with a statue of Aphrodite and steals into a temple at night to have sex with it.
The Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 17/18) embellished the narrative inMetamorphoses, his 250 stories linked by the theme of transformation. In his telling, Pygmalion is an artist from Cyprus who, after witnessing the licentious behavior of prostitutes, forsakes women and creates a statue with which he falls in love. He asks Venus to give him a wife as beautiful as the statue and soon discovers to his delight that the sculpture’s lips are warm and her skin is soft to his touch. Ovid’s tale of a creation brought to life, figuratively or literally, has fired the imagination ever since.
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