Pygmalion and the Ivory Maiden

Pygmalion had watched the women of Cyprus, the Propoetides, who had denied Aphrodite and been made to sell themselves in public until their faces hardened and then their bodies with them, and he decided he would rather live alone. He was a sculptor, and he worked instead. Out of a single piece of ivory he cut a woman more beautiful than any born, and then he did the thing that undid him: he fell in love with what he had made.

Ovid does not treat him as a fool, but he does not spare him either. Pygmalion talked to the statue. He touched it and could not decide whether it was ivory or flesh, and kissed it and imagined the kiss returned. He brought it presents that girls are supposed to like, shells and smooth stones and birds and beads of amber, and dressed it, and put rings on the fingers and a necklace at the throat, and thought the clothes suited it, and thought it no less lovely bare. He laid it on a bed with a mattress of Tyrian purple and called it his companion, and arranged its head on a feather pillow as if it could be uncomfortable.

At the festival of Aphrodite, when the heifers had gone down with their horns gilded and the incense was up, he stood at the altar and could not make himself say what he wanted. What he said was that he wished for a wife like his ivory girl. The goddess understood the sentence he had not finished, and the flame on the altar shot up three times into the air.

He went home and leaned over the couch and kissed her, and the mouth seemed warm. He kissed her again and put his hand on her chest, and the ivory softened under his fingers the way wax from Hymettus goes soft in the sun and takes the shape it is pressed into. He touched the veins with his thumb and felt a pulse.

Aphrodite came to the wedding. Nine months later there was a daughter, Paphos, and the city on the island that keeps the goddess's oldest sanctuary took her name.