ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the artistic and sexual embodiment of Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (10.243–97) and involves an ancient medical perspective over the myth of Pygmalion. It argues that Galatea’s conception represents a new type of fluid infusion opposed to previous models. While Ovid admires the first ‘god’ who fashioned the original beings from earth, he also shows that the post-deluge conception of humans involved a faulty version of the first Genesis, from the same fossilised ingredients (soil, earthly ‘veins’ and water, 1.409–10). Pygmalion, too, indirectly criticises the products of this creation when he despises womankind (10.243–7) and in particular the Propoetides, who could no longer blush, because they ‘hardened’ their blood through excessive sexuality (10.240–2). Women were usually seen as leaky and cold and, as a result, promiscuous and insatiable. Nevertheless, Pygmalion avoids these pitfalls in constructing his maiden from ivory. While ‘all-gifted’ and similar in origin to Hesiod’s Pandora, Pygmalion’s creation is flawless due to the absence of the damp and humid principles characterising other females (including the animated doll of Works and Days). Unlike the existing female kind, Galatea’s body does not corrupt any of the humours of her lover. Her nature does not allow loss of fluids but permanently incorporates her creator’s superior humours, in the very embrace of true love. In her case, real blood (10.280–93) substitutes from the beginning any inferior watery serum used in the conception of Pandora. Thus, the defects of the wet, leaky, and promiscuous life forms are corrected through this dry creature that does not waste the seed of her creator.
