Leucippos II, Daphne and Apollo
Interestingly, another myth tells of a different sex-changing LEUCIPPOS – this one a son of OENOMAUS – who fell in love with the naiad DAPHNE, whom Apollo also loved but had not so far wooed or seduced.
In order to be near Daphne, this Leucippos disguised himself as a girl and joined her company of nymphs. The jealous Apollo saw this and caused the reeds to whisper to Daphne that she and her attendants should bathe in the river. Accordingly they slipped out of their clothes and splashed about naked. When Leucippos, for obvious reasons, refused to remove his maidenly garb the girls teasingly stripped him bare, discovered his embarrassing and unmistakable secret, and angrily speared him to death.
By this time Apollo’s own lustful blood was up. He materialized and began a pursuit of Daphne. The terrified girl leapt out of the river and ran away as fast as she could, but he quickly gained on her. He had almost reached her when she sent up a prayer to her mother, Gaia and her father, the river god LADON. Just as Apollo closed in and touched her he felt her flesh change under his fingers. A thin bark formed over her breasts, her hair began to slither out into shining yellow and green leaves, her limbs wreathed themselves into branches and her feet slowly drove down roots into her mother Gaia’s receiving earth. A stupefied Apollo found that he was clutching not a naiad but a laurel tree.
For once in his life the god was chastened. The laurel became sacred to him and its wreath thenceforward crowned the brow, as I have said, of the winners of his Pythian Games at Delphi. To this day the winner of a great prize is still called a laureate.fn3
Galatea III and Pygmalion Too
The island of Cyprus, being the landing ground of spume-born Aphrodite, had long worshipped the goddess of love and beauty with a special fervour, earning Cypriots a reputation for libertine licentiousness and libidinous loose-living. Cyprus was thought of by the mainland as a degenerate place, an Island of Free Love.
In the southern port town of Amathus, a group of women known as the PROPOETIDES, or ‘daughters of Propoetus’, were so indignant at the amount of sexual licence that pervaded there, they even had the temerity to suggest that Aphrodite should no longer stand as the island’s patroness. To punish such blasphemous impertinence the wrathful Aphrodite visited upon these sanctimonious sisters feelings of insatiable carnal lust, at the same time ridding them of any sense of modesty or shame. So cursed, the women lost the ability to blush and began eagerly and indiscriminately to prostitute their bodies about the island.
A sensitive and wildly attractive young sculptor called PYGMALION saw the flagrant and shameless behaviour of the Propoetides and grew so disgusted that he decided to foreswear all love and sex in perpetuity.
‘Women!’ he muttered to himself as he set to work one morning on a commission to render in marble the face and figure of a general from Amanthus. ‘You won’t find me wasting my time on women. Oh no. Art is enough. Art is all. Love is nothing. Art is everything. Art is … well now, that’s strange …’
Pygmalion stepped back to look at his work and wrinkled his brow in surprise. His general was taking shape in the oddest way. He could have sworn the man had a beard. Furthermore, the old warrior may have been a little on the tubby side, but Pygmalion was sure he didn’t sport a pair of swelling breasts. Nor were his neck and throat so slender, smooth and irresistibly …
Pygmalion went out into the yard and dipped his head in the fountain of cold water that played there. Returning refreshed to the studio he looked again at his work in progress and could only shake his head in bewilderment. The general, when Pygmalion had been permitted to go round to his villa to study the great man’s features, had struck him as being constructed more on the lines of a warthog than anything human, and yet here he was emerging from the marble as nothing short of a refined and miraculous beauty. A distinctly feminine beauty at that.
Picking up a chisel, Pygmalion ran his artist’s eye over the work and knew that with some merciless and well-aimed blows he could easily enough get back on course and not waste the valuable block of marble for which he had paid a month’s income.
Crack, crack, crack!
This was more like it.
Tap, tap, tap!
Must have been some weird subconscious urge.
Chip, chip, chip!
Or indigestion perhaps.
Now, let’s step back again and see …
No!!!
Far from rescuing the work and bringing the general’s masculine and martial glare back to the face of his sculpture he had somehow managed only to amplify its soft femininity, grace, sensuality and – goddammit – sexiness.
He was in a fever now. Deep inside he knew he was no longer rescuing the general. He was on a mission to see through to the end the madness that had seized him.
The madness was of course the work of Aphrodite. She had not been pleased when one of the handsomest and most eligible young men of her island had chosen to turn his back on love. A young man moreover, whose seaside dwelling happened to be exactly where Aphrodite had made landfall after her birth in the waves and, she reasoned, ought therefore to vibrate with a special intensity of amorousness. Love and beauty, as most of us find out in the course of our lives, are remorseless, relentless and ruthless.
For days and nights Pygmalion laboured on in a frenzy of creativity, of literal enthusiasm. Generations of artists in all media since might have recognized the agonized, breathless ecstasy of inspiration that had seized him. No thought of food or drink – no conscious thought at all – came into his mind, as he tapped, hammered and hummed.
At last, as the pink flush of Eos and a nacreous flash of light from the east betokened the beginning of his fifth continuous day of work, he stepped back with the miraculous knowledge that only true artists understand: somehow, yes certainly, at last – it was finished.
He hardly dared raise his eyes. All his work thus far had been up close, detailed – the lineaments of the complete figure existed only in some dark inaccessible corner of his mind. For the first time he could take it all in. He took a deep breath and looked.
He cried out in shock and dropped his chisel.
From its exquisitely rendered toes to the perfectly worked flowers that wreathed the hair on its head the sculpture was far and away the best thing he had ever done. More than that, it was surely the most absolutely beautiful work of art that had ever been seen in the world. To a true artist like Pygmalion this meant it was more beautiful than any person that had ever been seen on earth, for he knew that art always exceeds the best that nature can manage.
Yet he saw that the figure he had rendered in marble from his enraptured imagination was even more than the most absolutely beautiful thing now in the world. She was real. To Pygmalion she was more real than the ceiling above his head and the floor beneath his feet.
His heart was beating fast, his pupils had dilated, his breath was short and the very core of his being stirred in the most powerful and disturbing manner. It was joy and pain all at once. It was love.
The expression and posture of the girl – whose name he knew should be Galatea, for her marble loveliness was white as milk – were caught in a moment of sublime hesitation, between awakening and wonder. She seemed a little surprised, as if on the verge of gasping. At what? At the beauty of the world? At the handsomeness of the young artist who was feasting his eyes so hungrily upon her? Her features were regular and perfect, but so were the features of many girls. There was more to her than conventional appeal. An inner loveliness of soul sang from her very core. Her lines were sweepingly, swoopingly, swooningly smooth, supple and sensuous. Her breasts seemed softly to be pushing out, her nakedness made so much more alluring by the way her hand touched her throat in a gesture of sweetly modest alarm.