Was Pygmalion’s statue called Galatea?

The story as Orpheus sings it

Ovid tells it in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, as one of the songs of Orpheus. Pygmalion, a sculptor on Cyprus, has given up on the women around him and lives alone. He carves a woman of snow-white ivory, more beautiful than any woman born, and falls in love with his own work.

She looks so alive that only modesty seems to keep her still: “So does his art conceal his art.” He keeps touching her to make sure she is really ivory, talks to her softly and brings her the gifts girls like: shells, songbirds, flowers, painted balls and beads of amber, the tears of Phaethon’s sisters. He dresses her in robes and puts rings on her fingers and a long necklace round her neck.

On the feast day of Aphrodite, whom Ovid calls Venus, all Cyprus crowds her altars. Pygmalion does not dare ask for the statue itself. He prays for “one like my ivory maid,” and the goddess, who knows exactly what he means, makes the altar flame leap three times. At home he takes the statue’s hand. It is warm. The ivory softens under his fingers like wax in the sun. “Yes, it was real flesh!” She opens her eyes and sees the sky and her lover at the same moment. Ovid adds that they had a child, Paphos, the name of the Cypriot city sacred to Venus.

Through all of it, Ovid calls her the ivory, the image, the maiden. He never gives her a name.

Where Galatea came from

The name belongs to the 18th century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion, a short play with music written in 1762 and first staged in Lyon in 1770, calls the statue Galathée, and the name, Galatea in English, stayed with her. W. S. Gilbert’s comedy Pygmalion and Galatea (1871) fixed it for English audiences. From Ovid to Rousseau is roughly 1,750 years.

The name was already in Ovid’s poem, only on a different woman: the sea nymph Galatea, daughter of Nereus, courted by the Cyclops Polyphemus in Book 13, the same giant who later meets Odysseus. In Greek it suggests milk, gala, which suits a woman carved from white ivory.

Eliza and My Fair Lady

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913) turns the statue into Eliza Doolittle, a London flower girl whom the phonetics professor Henry Higgins teaches to speak like a duchess. Shaw insisted that Eliza does not marry her teacher. The musical My Fair Lady (1956), and its 1964 film, set the story to music and left the ending more romantic.

The Pygmalion effect

In 1968 the psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson published Pygmalion in the Classroom. At an elementary school, teachers were told that certain pupils were about to bloom; the pupils had been picked at random, yet many of them gained more than their classmates on later tests. The Pygmalion effect names the idea that people tend to rise toward what others expect of them. Researchers still argue about how strong the effect is, but the name has stuck, like Galatea’s.