Galatea (mythology)

[8] It is retold in Ovid's Metamorphoses,[9] where the king Pygmalion is made into a sculptor who fell in love with a marble statue he had crafted with his own hands.

Of "this ecstatic relationship", Meyer Reinhold has remarked, "there may be lurking a survival of the ancient cult of the Great Goddess and her consort".

[6] Cinyras, perhaps the son of Paphus,[11] or perhaps the successful suitor of Metharme, founded the city of Paphos on Cyprus, under the patronage of Aphrodite, and built the great temple to the goddess there.

[12] Bibliotheke, the Hellenistic compendium of myth long attributed to Apollodorus, mentions a daughter of Pygmalion named Metharme.

In his view Pygmalion, the consort of the goddess's priestess at Paphos, kept the cult image of Aphrodite as a means of retaining power during his term, after which, Graves speculates, he refused to give up the goddess's image "and that he prolonged this by marriage with another of Aphrodite's priestesses—technically his daughter, since she was heiress to the throne—who is called Metharme ("change"), to mark the innovation".